Autre Ne Veut - Ego Free Sex Free

Sometimes trying to unravel why a song clicks for you is like trying to work out why your turn-ons are your turn-ons. And it’s tougher the harder you’ve fallen for it. I say this because Autre Ne Veut’s Ego Free Sex Free has actually been my personal song of the week every week since I got my hands on the ‘Anxiety’ LP. It’s the kind of track that compels me to yelp into the void via incomprehensible tweets, an act of abstract passion that’s the sort of grown-up’s version of a felt-tipped heart and initials on a toilet door.

Ego Free Sex Free is both the guts and groin of the Brooklyn artist’s second album ‘Anxiety’.

Abstract passion, as it so helpfully happens, is the realm of Ego Free Sex Free, and its flamboyant emotion is both the guts and groin of the Brooklyn artist’s second album ‘Anxiety’. Somewhere between soul-pop, funk and R&B, it’s a hot mess of heartbeat drums, swaggering hi-hats, chipmunk vocal chops and trance flourishes that act as foreplay to the climatic chorus when those keys finally, ecstatically, tumble like entangled limbs. It’s the kind of song made for dancing on your bed, jumping around like an excited teenager embracing attraction’s first flush; a sincere, ego-free moment before young adulthood’s self-consciousness consumes.

There’s actually a little of teen dream king Elvis’ posturing to ANV’s delivery, in spirit if not sonically. By which I mean it’s sexed-up but in a hyper-idealistic way: “I want to be your knight in amour / When you say this is forever,” he croons. For Ego Free Sex Free is the anthesis of the album’s concept, a fantasy-fuelled escape from the anxiety that runs through it. Autre Ne Veut’s music has always swung between these extremes, between existential pain and bodily release, the one a prerequisite for and deliverance from the other. Your Clothes from his ‘Body’ EP was the gloriously lusty other side of the coin to the gloomy goth-pop of Not The One.

Autre Ne Veut’s music has always swung between existential pain and bodily release, the one a prerequisite for and deliverance from the other.

The titular lyric is actually something he overheard on the street ANV told Pitchfork’s Carrie Battan last November: “I was smoking a cigarette outside of the studio and some dude was on his phone talking about the most amazing party he’d ever been to. He said, “It was so dark, it was like, ego-free, sex-free.” I literally just stole it and used it for that song.”

Whatever the source, the chorus – “Ego free sex free / I can’t feel my body moving / Ego free sex free / I can’t see your body, baby” – highlights the duality of the lyric. One reading – “ego-free, sex-free” – envisions a state free from the constraints of both ego and sex, but a second – “ego-free sex, free” – positions true freedom as a physical union without ego’s hang-ups. Both are desirous, both joyously idealistic, which is, I guess, a lot of the reason why this song presses my buttons.

Software released Autre Ne Veut’s new album ‘Anxiety’ on 26th February 2013.