The Stool Pigeon

Big hair, air-punching theatrics, throbbing Italo... this is Heartbreak, wildly boffined helium histrionics coupled with some of the most dancefloor-heavy eighties synths to be beamed out of this side of The Hague.

Heartbreak are Sebastian Muravchix, an Argentinean, and Ali Renault, who’s half British and half French. An odd-looking pair (Sebastian sings and resembles a sprightly demon, while Ali has studio bunker, lack-of-daylight weariness etched into those bags hanging round the bottom of his eyes), they’ve been causing splashes of excitement in the hippest quarters since they emerged earlier this year with what anyone with an eye for a neat USP now knows as ‘metallo’.

The pair met when Ali was cavorting around Argentina. They bonded over a shared love of Black Sabbath and techno legends Drexciya, but they didn’t start getting it on musically until they landed in the UK to try their hand at studying.
“We’ve spent two years experimenting, twiddling knobs, writing these songs together, and the breadth and scope of the record conveys that,” says Ali down a crackly phone line.

Indeed, debut album Lies, out on bastion of leftfield brilliance Lex, throws out disco with keyboards and Moogs, but it’s pole-axed by their love of throwing devil horns. And single ‘We’re Back’ may borrow from the past, but it still sounds like the future.
“‘We’re Back’ is a song about the ghosts of Italo returning from the disco to the radio,” explains Ali. “There are a few lyrical themes throughout the album, but this is one of the tracks that compares the stale standard of music today with music of the past.”

However smart the album is, you’ll need to see Heartbreak on stage to really make sense of the duo. At the Field Day festival in August, pure camp, metal and theatrics were mashed effortlessly together, and a tent full of poppers-ingesting loons bounced hard, despite the pissing rain and the omni-present sniffer dogs. As they say, playing live gives them a chance to break out of the blogosphere and into the ears of real people.

“Our first performance was at a house party, but the live element has always been there,” says Sebastian. “We’ve played together since the start.”

“It’s definitely not a stagnant robotic experience watching us,” adds Ali, before pausing. “Actually, maybe it is robotic in places. Field Day was wicked. The tent was rammed all the way round with people dancing. It was a great gig, even though the police seemed to be on commission for the number of arrests made that weekend.”
With a tour being lined up, their album just out, and the hype almost reaching boiling point, it seems there’s no stopping this underground, art school Italo-attack. But what about metallo?

“Metallo sums it up: it’s quite neat, but it works in terms of the music we like and the passion and energy our music has. Both metal riffs and Italo disco have the energy we feel we convey when we play together, especially on stage.”

“We are Heartbreak... and it’s perfect,” concludes Sebastian, defiantly.

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