On this October 10, 2025, Vanessa Paradis releases her eighth album, Le retour des beaux jours, created with Étienne Daho and Jean-Louis Piérot between Motorbass and Abbey Road. After seven years of studio silence, the singer explores rebirth, love, and mourning, invites Lily-Rose Depp and Jack Depp, and announces a 2026 tour. A measured joy is sought, voice captured up close, strings in chiaroscuro.
An Introduction: A Curtain Rises
A microphone in hand, October 10, 2025, the room still buzzing with the thrill of the first notes. One might see the scene as Étienne Daho dreamed it: a clear, almost cinematic appearance. Vanessa Paradis hadn’t released anything for seven years. She returns with Le retour des beaux jours, the eighth album of a career that began in adolescence. Moreover, we find this voice grain that has learned tact, purity, and ardent restraint. This record chooses clarity without denying gravity. The promise of the title is not naivety but a state of calm vigilance, a way of inhabiting joy with caution.
Los Angeles, Paris, London: Intimate Map of an Album
The album’s narrative thread intertwines Los Angeles, Paris, and London. The Californian muse-city provides one of the central tracks, Les initiales des anges, a delicately ambivalent portrait of an urban mirage whose light eventually betrays the cracks. In Paris, Motorbass brings the imprint of a studio where rhythms are drawn close to the body. In London, Abbey Road lends its orchestral velvet and legendary echo chambers. The journey composes a sentimental map: the smell of Californian asphalt, the artisanal precision of a Parisian setting, the British solemnity of the strings. When listening, these landscapes respond to each other, as if the singer had spread an alternating montage over her music.
A Trio at the Helm: Paradis, Daho, Piérot
The artistic direction is written with six hands. Vanessa Paradis, Étienne Daho, and Jean-Louis Piérot create a pop-soul material whose palette refers to the 1960s and 1970s. The strings, abundant but never decorative, draw fine arches above medium tempos. The voice, captured quite closely, remains the fixed point of the mix; it leads the melodies with elegance without emphasis. Daho’s imprint is recognized in the art of levitation, this ascending movement that opens Cœur ardent and carries the title track, Le retour des beaux jours. Piérot, for his part, weaves the harmonies, chisels the bridges, and creates a space that is both airy and carnal.
The Making of a Timbre: Spontaneity and Discipline
The artist has recounted: several vocal takes were kept from the demos, to retain the initial inflection, the palpitation of the text still fresh. This proximity effect is heard in Trésor or Rendez-vous. In parallel, she resumed a regular technical work. The voice, softened by quitting smoking, has broadened in places; it descends without fatigue, rises without forcing, and better accepts nuance. This blend of spontaneity and discipline produces a less constrained, freer singing in the enunciation of consonants. Moreover, it unfolds the syllables as one turns a photo under the lamp.
Light and Shadow: Rebirth, Love, Mourning
The album seeks rebirth without dodging the shadow. Élégie constitutes the center of gravity: a sustained prayer, addressed to the departed, which Jean-Louis Piérot and Étienne Daho helped write and arrange so that modesty does not confuse with silence. The song breathes through its restraint and economy of effects. Moreover, a slightly out-of-tune piano seems to hesitate, like memory stumbling over an image. Elsewhere, love takes the initiative again, less flamboyant than continuous, in Un amour de jeunesse or Make You Mine, while Les initiales des anges places urban speed on the ridge line between euphoria and weariness.
Transmission as a Background Line
Obvious but never ostentatious, the family dimension runs through the album. Lily-Rose Depp lends an English text to I Am Alive, a piano ditty whose final sweetness closes the album on a simple affirmation: staying alive. Jack Depp signs the composition of Éléments (son of Johnny Depp), a piece tinged with a jazz breath singularized by Erik Truffaz‘s trumpet. In these contributions, it’s not so much the headline effect that matters but the circulation of a gesture: writing, composing, seeking the right note, passing on the flame. The album is enriched by this circulation from the close to the universal.
The Overall Sound: Orchestral Soul, Clear Pop
In terms of sound, the album assembles a framework of supple basses and polished drums. Furthermore, cinematic strings play the role of a secondary narrator. The mixing favors intelligibility: words are understood, breathing is perceived, the melodic line is followed like a path. This economy gives the singles – Bouquet final and Le retour des beaux jours – an immediate melodic efficiency. The refrains linger in memory, without harshness, through an art of the straight cut.
A Measured Approach: Elegance, but Contained Reliefs
The first reviews praise the light and composure of the whole. However, they point out a homogeneity that sometimes dampens the circulation of contrasts. The dominant mid-tempos, aligned like a series of fixed shots, can give the impression of an channeled emotion rather than an overflowing one. The logic of coherence sought by the trio is understood; the album gains in narrative continuity what it sometimes loses in roughness. It also gains a narrative coherence and a voice intelligibility rarely denied. This reservation does not detract from the precision of the writing or the quality of the arrangements; it simply indicates the chosen line: a lateral intensity, at soul level, that refuses showmanship.
A Story of Time: Forty Years or Almost
The arc of the journey is measured. From 1987 to today, from Joe le taxi to Les Sources and then to Le retour des beaux jours, Vanessa Paradis has shifted her silhouette from teenage icon to a singer-actress whose voice now allows for more amber tones. The silence 2018 → 2025 was not a withdrawal; it was the time of another stage, between cinema (her films) and theater, the time of a slow transformation. In this eighth album, one hears less a rupture than a shift: the same person, moved a step, looking further, speaking lower, accepting the depth of field.
Exit Mechanics: Singles, Screens, Waves
The strategy remains classic and readable. The title track Le retour des beaux jours preceded the official release. Then, it was followed by music videos. Additionally, there were appearances on TV shows and radio. The album, available since October 10, 2025, is offered with visual sobriety; the public presence focuses on a few measured words, interpretations without overload. The promotional rhythm supports the album without overwhelming it. It’s as if everything had to match the tempo chosen by the music, including the images.
Studios: The Art of Precision
At Motorbass, the tradition of a urban and organic French sound is reaffirmed, in textures of supple drums, guitars compressed sparingly, and synthesizers with muted attacks. At Abbey Road, the orchestra finds its perspectives. The placement of the stands and the use of natural spaces add a volume that never overwhelms the voice. The production trio ensures not to overload: the strings are not a luxury, they are a form.
Daho, the Everlasting Ally
Étienne Daho does not settle for a signature; he brings with him a method. Precise writing, brief cuts, bridges that restart the march, attention to articulation. His way of opening air windows in the rhythm is also perceived. This allows the voice to pass, light and precise. Piérot, discreet but decisive, orchestrates the details: a bass line that corrects the harmony, a flute counterpoint, a very short echo at the end of a phrase. The singer, she, sinks into the center of the circle, guided without being held.
"Éléments": A Grave Joy
The track Éléments is marked by the visit of Erik Truffaz, a clear trumpet that crosses the piece like a discreet line, brushing the motif without engulfing it. One hears a grave joy, a feeling of nature stronger, a terrestrial profession of faith. Jack Depp‘s composition places this track in another frequency, slightly more mobile, where the voice allows itself a space, a trail of breath, a step aside.
2026 Stage: Promise Kept
The Le retour des beaux jours tour is announced from March to November 2026. The heart will beat strongly in Paris, where the Zénith hosts two announced evenings on May 21 and 22, 2026. Other major appointments are outlined, including a significant stop at the Accor Arena. This schedule extends the promise of the album: to dance without blinding oneself, to hold the light high enough for everyone to see. One then imagines the opening of the concert: a curtain rising, a string motif, then the voice, set without trembling.
An Assumed Classicism
Le retour des beaux jours does not invent a language, it perfects a manner. This classicism does not forbid risks: keeping a fragile take, lightening a chorus, removing a high note, relying on diction to imprint memory. The duration of an album thus conceived is not that of a flash, but of a trace. It is re-listened to because it holds by its right measure, because it gives without raising its voice. There is a maturity here that does not renounce fervor.
Holding the Clear Line
At the end of the listening, one retains the image of a clear line. Vanessa Paradis advances with caution, but she advances. She does not seek the flash that burns; she works the light that lasts. The album Le retour des beaux jours by Vanessa Paradis is a record designed to accompany rather than to dazzle; it settles, it infuses, it gently opens a window. In the wake of Daho and Piérot, with the discreet and just presence of her children, the singer finds what constitutes the essence of a four-decade journey: fidelity to a voice that, without raising the tone, continues to find the words, and the breath, to name what holds us.