“I decided to be clear”: why Bilal Hassani evokes his rape on his new album

It is this Friday that Bilal Hassani finds the record store shelves. The 23-year-old singer returns with Theorem, his third studio album. Accustomed to personal texts since his first single King (2019), the French artist returns in one of the titles of this new album to a particularly painful episode: that of a rape, which he claims to have suffered in 2019.

“This album was (…) a reconstruction after a traumatic experience, a rape, which I mentioned once in seven to eight so that people can understand,” Bilal Hassani tells the Parisianin this Thursday’s edition.

the interpreter of Everything’s fine I had evoked this nightmarish evening for the first time on the weekly TF1 program last September. She had recounted an evening to which she had attended in the company of “a person from (her) circle of hers” and during which he had found himself “under the influence of a substance that he (did not) not want to take.” . The next morning, she woke up next to this person.

“I was so embarrassed”

it’s in the song What time is itto be published in Theorem, which Bilal Hassani remembers tonight. “My eardrums are crackling / I can’t move / My body is numb / My God, but what time is it?” he sings.

I had already half mentioned it last year, in the single Lights offas explained in Parisian:

“I was talking about a stolen house. It was actually my body. My fans didn’t understand, so I decided to be clear. I wanted to make another song about it to get rid of it.”

“The recording of the title was horrible”, continues in the columns of the newspaper. “It took me three hours, but it did me good. Because I didn’t file a complaint. With my group of friends we decided not to do anything. Because we were afraid of this person’s reactions. I was 19 years old, she was about my age, my mother said hers. And we left it at that. I was so embarrassed. I need to appear very strong because I’m perceived as very weak, tiny, tiny.”

For his musical comeback, Bilal Hassani has surrounded himself with a completely new team: Theorem it was co-produced with Grand Marnier and Tepr, two-thirds of the Yelle trio. The first extracts Everything’s fine Y He or shethey promise an album with more electro sounds than the previous ones.