Benoit & Sergio - Lost Decade (2022)

It’s been a full 13 years since the electronic dance music duo Benoit & Sergio released their debut EP What I’ve Lost; they were interviewed for Pitchfork’s Rising in 2012 and last released any new music in 2017. This year, they’ll finally release their debut album. Lost Decade is out August 26 via FourFour. In 2019, Benoit & Sergio’s Benjamin Jay teamed with Darkside’s Dave Harrington under the name Lights Fluorescent to release the album The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons.

Benoit & Sergio have ridden the wave of their curious dance blends since coming together for their first collaborative release back in 2009, dropping a surge of singles and EPs left and right for labels like Spectral Sound and Visionquest. They sit at a trans-Atlantic confluence of styles, with French house influences driving the beats and American indie informing hazy vocals.

Lost Decade is the latest to come from the duo; not only is it their first new material since 2017, but it’s also their debut full length album, placing them at an exciting peak in their careers. Benoit & Sergio gather the best of their sonic abilities for a series of slowburning tracks that explore woozy melancholia and ecstatic extroversion in equal measure. ‘Its Enough You Mention Me’ opens with an eerie fade, stuttering into a calmer atmosphere than their previous EP You Eat You Want. Layers of lush ambience build amongst patiently evolving beat sequences, verdant textures painted in emerald green and the smoky wisps of wistful vocals.

Dazzling synths and washed out guitars carry on in ‘Even Viridian’, its warm distortion giving a sun-bleached feel in tandem with the fiery synths and bright piano flourishes on ‘Pars Autre Part’. Shuffling drums ripple in ‘Minds And Drums’, with a piano pendulum swinging from one note to the next, while the keys tiptoe more carefully on ‘Where We Are’, a bass heavy minimal techno track made for the rumbling subwoofers of underground clubs.

Over a decade since the start of their career, Benoit & Sergio are far from lost, with their debut album containing some of their most potent material yet.