Montreal-based art punk collective La Sécurité boldly return with the announcement of their sophomore album Bingo!, due out June 12 via Mothland (CA, US) and Bella Union (Rest of the World). With Bingo!, La Sécurité have crafted yet another genuine and inspired collection of beautiful curiosities as the resulting forays into subversive pop are catchy and dancey, while introducing even more no wave, noise rock, and shoegaze elements to their signature alloy of bilingual art rock.
Alongside the news, today La Sécurité offered title track “Bingo,” a clever latter-day nod to early-2000s disco punk, fueled by frantic drums, crunchy bass, intricate auxiliary percussion flurries, as well as a slew of hooks, courtesy of fuzzed-out guitars and new wave-y synthesizers. First premiered via Post-Trash, this stubbornly sticky number (pun intended) by the Montréal/Tiohtià:ke collective is all about embracing inspiration as it comes, its lyrics stemming from the filename of an early voice-memoed version of the song.
“‘Bingo’ was a working title Melissa used to save the demo when we were working on the song,” the band explains. “The lyrics came later following a suggestion from Félix to describe a game of Bingo, to put into words the social life from an old folks home—elderly people that are young at heart, hence the references to Orange Crush, little hats, etcetera. The bass line and its tone are a tribute to Death From Above 1979.”
The accompanying video is a colorful explosion of collage animation that captures the non-stop energy from the track’s namesake, bingo. Philippe Beauséjour, the director, expands that the track’s “energy inspired in me the anxiety of the players leaving the hall with a big sum. It’s like a light social activity evening that can turn into a frenetic obsession with combinations of letters and numbers, stimulated by repetitive movements, sugary drinks, and cigarettes. The numbered cards become calculated abstra
La Sécurité (Montréal/Tiohtià:ke) is a collective whose art punk is equal parts: jumpy beats, off-kilter arrangements and minimalistic melodic hooks; run through an insomniac filter, the result of excessive exposure to the city’s neon lights. The music is all about living dangerously, perfectly agreeable to being blasted onto dancefloors; while the lyrics share the ethos of the Riot Grrrl movement, and celebrate the autonomization of women, friends (mean and nice) as well as benevolence. Following the release of Polaris Music Prize 2024 long-listed debut Stay Safe! (June 16th, 2023)—as well as its joyous offspring Stay Safe! REMIXED (March 8th, 2024)—with Mothland, the five-piece offered singles “Detour” (October 22nd, 2024) and “Ketchup” (January 28th, 2025), setting the stage for a new influx of D.I.Y. sonic gems, this time also teaming up with Simon Raymonde’s seminal British imprint: Bella Union. Hence, the motley bunch continues to meander the fringes of punk, new wave and krautrock, mischievously flouting stylistic form every chance they get by way of sophomore long-player Bingo!.
On any given day, you can find La Sécurité sporting thrift-shopped goodies while smashing through their set in a fabled underground venue, the rooftop of a tanning salon for a niche festival, or live on Riley & Coe (BBC 6). And for a true vintage musical onslaught, look no further than that VHS tape they did for AudiotreeLive. Through and through, the Québec outfit indulge in a symbiotic hurrah of disheveled music, cloaked poetry and improv dancing, with movement as a main creative fuel. Since coming together in the Spring of 2022, they have been invited to perform noteworthy events such as SXSW(amongst NPR’s Best of SXSW 2025), End of the Road, The Great Escape,Reeperbahn, and Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, also touring alongside The Go! Team (US 2024) and The Rapture (UK/EU 2025), and sharing the stage with the likes of Automatic, Mauskovic Dance Band, and Death Valley Girls. “The bilingual post-punk jams the quintet dishes out are insanely catchy, with vocalist Éliane Viens’ carefree dance moves and multiple trips into the crowd making for a captivating frontperson.” (Consequence)
Stay Safe!, the introductory studio album from La Sécurité, is manic yet surprisingly laid-back, painting unique sonic graffitis evoking a polymorphic reality. Bill Pearis from BrooklynVegan describes the long-player as “arty, danceable new-wave post-punk, […] equal parts hooks and attitude with an enticing batch of party-friendly jams shouted in sneering Franglais.” Under the Radar’s Dom Gourlay quips: “La Sécurité take the best bits of post-punk—and by “best bits”, we mean Talking Heads, Devo, Kleenex and the B-52s—and turn it into something altogether new and exciting for the 21st Century.” For their first full-length, the collective turned to producer Samuel Gemme at Gamma Recording Studio, printing songs that are empowering, flush with urgency, but also denote a dash of melancholia. The album reached #2 on !Earshot, #33 on NACC, while being championed by BBC’s Iggy Pop and Marc Riley, the latter exclaiming: “Good lord that is excellent!” The following year, the flamboyant bunch offered Stay Safe! REMIXED (March 8th, 2024 via Mothland), a collection including remixes from Born at Midnite, The Mauskovic Dance Band, and Freak Heat Waves, giving listeners a yet another fix of that “addictively saccharine angular pop” (The Line of Best Fit).
La Sécurité’s followup Bingo! was produced by Félix Bélisle and Emmanuel Éthier (Corridor, Chocolat, Population II, etc.), and features idiosyncratic proto-pop anomalies that should please fans of Dry Cleaning, Le Tigre, or Wet Leg. Following up on their critically-acclaimed debut Stay Safe!, the five-piece further implement polyrhythms, counter-intuitive chord changes, as well as subtle melodic and harmonic dissonance.
Whether tackling knotty themes such as mental health (“Power Snoozer”), the autonomization of women (“Princesse”), or dysfunctional relationships (“Deny”) with moxie, humorly musing about food (“Snack City”), addressing everyday mundanity with a sarcastic tone (“Ketchup”), or simply celebrating unsung heroes such as the elderly (“Bingo”); songs from Bingo! are all at once snarky and heartfelt, delinquent and benevolent. La Sécurité also shed the stigma around sexual workers with “Trixie”, while asking to be left alone on franco egg punk earworm “Nah Nah”, and debunking myths around new relationship energy (N.R.E.) on deep cut “Chill Pill”. As was the case on previous recordings (a noteworthy example being feminist anthem “Hot Topic”), many tracks saw the group improvise lyrics in the studio, effectively catching lightning in a bottle.
While writing the album, the group—Éliane Viens (vocals, synthesizers, percussion, drums), Félix Bélisle (bass, synthesizers, percussion, piano, production), Kenny Smith (drums, guitar), Laurence Anne Charest-Gagné(guitar, percussion, vocals), and Melissa Di Menna (guitar, synthesizers, vocals, percussion, artworks)—indulged in jazz-tinged musical envolées, improvising many of the hooks to be found on the record. Songs were then carefully encapsulated by engineer Renny Wilson (Nap Eyes, Mitch Davis, Faith Healer, etc.), using rare ribbon microphones and vintage compressors—with the band playing live off-the-floor—before being mixed by co-producers Bélisle and Emmanuel Éthier (Corridor, Population II, Chocolat, etc.) and mastered by Robin Schmidt (Pixies, The Hives, Viagra Boys, etc.). In turn, Bingo! aptly harnesses La Sécurité’s natural sound, which fuses calculated musical chaos and uncanny musicality in dealing a powerful and distinct barrage of decibels.
Bingo!Tracklist:
1. Snack City
2. Deny
3. Detour
4. Power Snoozer
5. Princesse
6. Bingo
7. Chill Pill
8. Trixie
9. Nah Nah
10. Ketchup
