The follow-up to the prodigiously gifted Star Feminine Band's 2020 debut album, sees the seven-piece all-female group - aged between 12 and 19 - from Benin release 10-track studio album 'In Paris'.
To produce a record can be quite an adventure - to do so with young girls from Northwest Benin is one tall order. Though not exactly a world music label, Born Bad took up the challenge and released Star Feminine Band's first album to critical acclaim. Unfortunately, the subsequent European tour was cancelled due to Covid. The pandemic didn't get the better of them, though; with their desire to go up on European stages still very much alive, the combo reappeared on the Transmusicales festival's line-up just one year later and recorded this album whilst in France.
The album presents a feverish and energetic soundtrack in which nabo, peulh and waama are enlivened with drum lines and spiced up with more "modern" sounds, spreading words of tolerance and kindness. Simple and direct, they speak of their reality, of the ills of young women who don't always have a choice. Often out of school and destined to selling peanuts, bananas or gari on the roadside, most of the girls around there don't have a future. Forced marriage, precocious pregnancies
Thanks to the English lessons that their manager Jérémie Verdier has been providing every Sunday night for two years over videoconference, the girls even experimented with English lyrics in "We Are Star Feminine Band" and "Woman Stand Up".
