Yves Jarvis is the latest moniker of Montreal’s Jean-Sebastian Audet, who you might know from his previous project, Un Blonde. Writing back in 2016 on Good Will Come to You, we described Un Blonde as “a musician who defies any clear genre label in favour of variation, cross-pollination and experimentalism.” The record was a melting pot of everything from acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies to beats and field recordings, hinting at the plastic, ever-changing style that underpins Audet’s work.
The new name follows this spirit of change. “I felt like I had found, finally, phonetically, the perfect project name with Un Blonde,” Audet says. “I thought it evoked the proper imagery for all the shit I wanted to do.” But that was then, and this is now, and Audet is one to follow intuition. “I’m at a place where I feel like when I hear it, I don’t like it because I don’t identify with it at all. I knew I needed something that I could identify with.” Rise Yves Jarvis—his middle name matched with the surname of his mother.
Yves Jarvis is intended as a blank page after Un Blonde, but one thing that is retained is the creative fluidity. Back with his first music since 2019’s The Same But By Different Mean, last month saw the release of ‘Victim’, a brand new Yves Jarvis single that once again defies clear categorization. Laid out on a bed of soft vocals, the track doesn’t so much walk the line between folk and R&B as erase it, rising above to a plane of its own.
The track’s lyrics focus on this too, ruing attempts to constrain and sustain the notion of ‘normal’, coming to represent not only the overbearing desire for neat classification in art but across a wider context too. Beneath the languid rhythms, Audet is seething, describing himself as a “vitriolic mass of dynamite / just bound to ignite,” but the juxtaposition does not come across ironic or jarring. For this is an old anger, familiar and timeworn. It sits the palm like a pebble.
I’m a victor of process
and bound to result
just plowing the field
relentlessly to no endI’m a victim of the same old stuff
my father was
‘Victim’ is out now via ANTI- Records and available via the Yves Jarvis Bandcamp page.