Yseult’s new single SUPERSTAR sounds like someone raiding the pop archive and deciding the future belongs to her anyway.
The track arrives in the wake of Freak and Now or Never, continuing Yseult’s increasingly obvious flirtation with the golden age of American R&B. But SUPERSTAR feels particularly interesting because it isn’t simply retro. It understands why the music of Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and the great Black vocalists of the ’80s and ’90s felt so enormous in the first place: attitude, rhythm, sexuality, theatricality and absolute vocal authority.
The New Jack Swing influence is impossible to miss. Online listeners have already picked up on the Jacksonian DNA, with one reaction describing Freak as exactly the kind of “Jacksonian new jack swing” they had been waiting for. SUPERSTAR pushes that conversation further, marrying glossy, physical production with Yseult’s much rougher, more idiosyncratic vocal presence. (Bias List)
There is also something distinctly Janet about the song’s relationship with self-invention. Janet’s great records turned pop stardom into a language of control: choreography, sexuality, vulnerability and rebellion could all exist simultaneously. Yseult approaches that territory from a contemporary position, with considerably less interest in sounding “perfect”. Her voice has grain, weight and personality.
And then there is Chaka Khan. Yseult does not sound like Chaka, nor is she attempting to recreate that particular vocal architecture. What connects them is the refusal to make power feel polite. Yseult sings as though the voice itself is part of the costume: sometimes glamorous, sometimes abrasive, sometimes deliberately excessive.
The Crystal LaBeija sample adds another layer. It gives the track a direct connection to queer Black performance history, making the word “superstar” feel less like a generic pop aspiration and more like a declaration of identity and survival. Listeners have singled out the sample as one of the track’s defining details. (Reddit)
That is ultimately what makes Yseult interesting in this lineage. She isn’t trying to become the next Michael or Janet. She is taking pieces of their vocabulary and filtering them through a very different artist: French, Black, queer-coded, fashion-conscious, emotionally confrontational and completely uninterested in behaving like a conventional pop star.
Yseult once described her ambition as wanting to be a rock star while specifically embracing being a Black artist.
SUPERSTAR suggests she has found another route to exactly that scale: make the past sound dangerous again.