When two Brown University professors walk into a studio, you don’t expect them to walk out with BLUE — a record that manages to be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally unguarded. Chalumeau, the duo of Katherine Bergeron and Butch Rovan, have taken the long way around to pop-rock, and the result is an album that feels like a thesis on love written in ten dialects of music.
The album’s arc plays like a novel in three acts. “Homecoming” opens with the hopeful illusion of finding safety in someone else, its quiet beauty setting up the betrayals and reckonings to come. From there, BLUE pinballs across genres with uncommon fluidity: the Afro-Latin groove of “Candombe” doesn’t feel like a stylistic detour but a necessary step in the emotional storyline; “Hide” punches hard with rock resentment; “La Vérité” slips into a bossa nova rhythm to land its elegant revenge. The title track, placed dead center, is the gut punch—a stark ballad that drapes grief in delicate tones, halting everything around it like a held breath.
What makes BLUE remarkable isn’t the stylistic variety on its own—plenty of eclectic records exist—but the fact that every shift in genre feels tethered to meaning. Chalumeau doesn’t change clothes for fun; they change clothes because the story demands it. By the time you arrive at “You Can Count on Me,” the album’s closing hymn of loyalty, it feels less like the end of a playlist and more like the conclusion of a long play you’ve sat with in real time.
Self-producing an album this ambitious is no small feat. Bergeron’s reflective walks and Rovan’s sonic instincts forged something deeply personal yet surprisingly accessible. BLUE is proof that music can be both heady and heartfelt, rigorous and raw. It’s a debut that already sounds like a culmination.
