Pauvre cavallo
Rase les murs d’un placebo
Autant que la douleur s’éteint
Ô, Mais si la douleur t’aime bien?
Montreal’s Automelodi returns with Cavallo, a video as spontaneous as it is spellbinding, a meditation on futility and false dawns delivered through the contours of Francophone synth-pop. Frontman Xavier Paradis has always treated language and sound as equal conspirators, and here he lets the image step into the conversation, setting his music against a raw, salt-bitten stage.
The song itself conjures a wounded horse, forever racing yet never arriving. Its phrases carry the ache of disappointment, of illusions clung to and dissolved. Over sleek, Italo-inflected rhythms, Paradis sings of scars and jealous waters, of an animal tethered and adrift. That duality – the gallop and the fall, the drive and the collapse – charges the track with a volatile energy that spills into the visual. With Cavallo, Automelodi has given us a hymn for ruins and horizons, where post-punk electronics meet ancient stone and the restless air insists on carrying every note a little further than expected.
The video, captured during a day off on tour, unfolds on Pomègues, one of the Frioul islands off Marseille. What begins as a casual detour becomes a cinematic dispatch from the edge of the Mediterranean. The limestone cliffs, pale and commanding, catch the late sun and glow with a muted fire, their surfaces serving as mirrors for the emotional terrain of the song. You see no contrived storyline, no staged performance; just landscape, movement, and the restless push of the elements.
At the center is the Mistral, that relentless wind known for reshaping moods and tempers alike. Hawes’ lens (filmmaker Kate Hawes) makes the invisible force visible, the air itself becoming the restless protagonist. Grasses bend, gulls slice the sky, bodies lean into resistance. The human presence, slight and improvised, seems fragile next to this constant rush, echoing the horse’s futility in the lyrics. The beauty lies in its simplicity. The budget barely exceeded the price of a ferry ticket, yet the result feels vast, charged by nature’s scale and indifference. There’s a sly resonance in staging this meditation on despair so near to the Château d’If, where Dumas once trapped his fictional prisoner, The Count of Monte Cristo. In Cavallo, confinement is more abstract: an endless loop of striving, crashing, rising again.
Watch the clip for “Cavallo” below:
The Cavallo EP will include five tracks (with the title song among them) pressed on 12-inch vinyl (YCR/208), along with a digital bonus remix of Cavallo by Ortrotasce. Released by the German imprint Young & Cold Records, the EP will be available for pre-order on August 22, with the physical edition expected in early November 2025. These five songs mark Xavier Paradis’s renewed focus on Automelodi after the early post-pandemic years spent mixing and producing for artists such as Laura Krieg, Bootblacks, and The Harrow. One track also features experimental sound artist James Nicholas Dumile Goddard (Skin Tone, Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, and more) on saxophone.
The cover art and design were created by longtime Automelodi friend and collaborator Jean Lorenzo (aka Silent EM), for whom Paradis also mixed the Real Life LP in 2024.
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