Madeon's First Album in Almost Seven Years Is Out. 'Victory' Trades the Sugar Rush for Something Meaner.

Madeon put out his third album today. That sentence took almost seven years to write.

Victory arrived June 26 on Mom+Pop, ten tracks, the French producer's first full record since 2019's Grammy-nominated Good Faith. For context on how long that is: when Good Faith came out, Hugo Pierre Leclercq was 25 and the dominant mode in pop-leaning electronic music was the bright, churchy euphoria he and Porter Robinson had spent the decade perfecting. He has spent the gap since deciding he wanted to make something that sounds almost nothing like it.

The pivot is the story

Good Faith was sugar and light, big synth chords arranged like stained glass. Victory is meaner. The album leans into punk, indie rock, and electro-clash, the chaotic dance subgenres that were bubbling up in the early 2000s before EDM sanded everything smooth. Leclercq is not subtle about the reset. He brought in a guitarist, Bleachers' Mikey Freedom Hart, to play most of the album's guitar, which is not a thing you do if you are making another laptop-maximalist record.

You can hear the turn in the singles. "Fire Away," the lead, pairs him with pop provocateur Slayyyter over a dark, chugging beat that pulls from darkwave and French electro. Leclercq called it "perhaps the most anthemic record on the album," and described the lyric as "love is warfare, words like weapons of the brokenhearted." It is a breakup song you can dance to, which is an old trick, but the production keeps it from feeling cheap.

"Red Jacket," the last single before release, brings in Scottish producer Sam Gellaitry and lands bright and wistful, fuzzed-out and propulsive, a song about letting go that sits at the penultimate slot on the record. "Super Platinum," with Flatbush Zombies' Erick the Architect, is the one that most openly waves at the old electro-house heroes, all overdriven synths in the MSTRKRFT mold before it slides into something closer to funk and disco-house.

Here is the full tracklist:

Why this matters more than a normal release

Madeon is one of the few people in this lane who can claim genuine prodigy status, and the receipts are public. In 2011, at 17, he posted a Launchpad mashup called "Pop Culture" that wove 39 samples together in real time on a single Novation controller. It went viral in the way that minted careers back then, and it set the template for a whole generation of producers who learned that showing your hands was part of the performance.

Sam Gellaitry, his collaborator on "Red Jacket," was one of those kids. "I remember watching Pop Culture mashup and being so intrigued," Gellaitry said in the press release. "Madeon to me is a trailblazer in regards to what we normalize today on social media, and in regards to showing off production chops in a performance way." A 14-year-old in Stirling, Scotland, teaching himself to produce, was watching the same clip that made Leclercq famous. Now they have a song together. That is the whole arc of an internet-native scene in one credit.

He has been quietly testing the new material live, too. At Coachella this spring he surprised the weekend-two crowd with a French touch DJ set and slipped in at least one unreleased Victory cut.

The tour is real

This is not a streaming-only victory lap. The 31-date Victory Live Tour starts September 24 in Portland and runs through November 21 at Chicago's Radius, with the same visual team that built out his Good Faith Forever shows. Madeon's live production has always been the argument for taking him seriously as more than a singles artist, so the bigger question for Victory is whether these scrappier, guitar-forward songs hit as hard in a room as the cathedral chords did.

The reinvention is the gamble. Good Faith gave him a sound that was instantly his. Walking away from it to chase trash-punk and electro-clash is the move of someone more interested in not repeating himself than in printing the same hit twice. Seven years is a long time to make people wait. Victory at least has the decency to not be the album they were expecting.