The Japanese art of kintsugi is not about fixing a broken bowl, it’s about realizing the object was never truly broken. The golden seams remind us that our cracks are not flaws, but the very places where the light gets in. Life, too, mends itself in shimmering imperfections. We spend so much time resisting change, clinging to the illusion of wholeness, when in truth we are always being reassembled by time. To live is to be shattered and rejoined, over and over, until we see that the art was never in the porcelain, but in the patient, gleaming act of becoming.
Matthieu Roche, better known as Fragrance., makes music like someone rebuilding their heart with both hands tied. His new record, Kintsugi, is less a collection of songs than an act of repair: gold poured into the cracks of a life too fragile to throw away. You can hear the glue drying in real time: synths sighing, basslines prowling the ruins of yesterday. Each track feels like it was recovered from a dream, dusted off, and allowed to breathe again.
“Kintsugi is about embracing the cracks – learning to live with what’s been broken, and finding strength in the fragile,” Roche says. He’s not waxing poetic; he’s whispering hard-won truth. The album’s pulse is driven by the quiet miracle of existing after the storm. His voice moves like liquid mercury, intimate but untouchable, the kind of tone that makes sadness feel like a shared secret.
Roche’s synths shimmer between cathedral and club, guided by co-producer Sophia Hamadi (S DIAMAH, Opale), who threads each rhythm with restraint. The result is a reflection of someone learning to hold themselves steady.
By the time Gone, Vanished lands, Kintsugi has already built its own quiet cosmos. “The song evokes a state of evanescence,” Roche explains. “There is a tension between presence and absence, as if running away from one’s own emotions, even though these experiences remain deeply internalized, with fear, melancholy, and beauty circulating within to sustain life.” It’s that very tension that animates the album: a dance between absence and attachment.
Listen to Kintsugi below and order the album here.
Roche’s evolution has been steady and deliberate. After remixing Mylène Farmer alongside David Lynch and The Hacker, and seeing Attiré par le chaos light up playlists across continents, Kintsugi feels like the sound of someone who’s stopped sanding away their edges and started filling the fractures with light.
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