Nearly 400 years ago, the chief minister to King Louis XIII established l’Académie Française, a council whose aims were to prevent “impurity” from sullying the French language. The Académie operates to this day as a coven of cloak wearers who preside over matters of linguistic importance: A recent decision had them lowering their shields against the scourge of Anglophone terms like “email” and “chicken nuggets.”

France’s stuffiness about its mother tongue is one of the reasons why pop music with English lyrics became standard for the country’s native bands since the dawn of the rock’n’roll era—it represented the rebellious antithesis of traditional chanson française. “For my generation of musicians, this idea emerged that it was old-fashioned to write in French and that you were aligning yourself with the pompous, middle-class 30-something crowd,” says 36-year-old Agnès Gayraud, singer of Parisian minimalist pop act La Féline. “If you sang in French, either you were simple or preachy—totally uncool, basically, nothing to do with the radical possibilities of rock that you imagined when you were a teenager.”

But times have changed, and La Féline are now among those who are rebelling against the rebellion by spearheading the unlikely rehabilitation of French as the language of pop within France. “These days, it’s almost tacky to sing in English,” Gayraud suggests. “It means sacrificing your creative desires for the promise of an international career—which, as we know, only happens for a select few acts, and rarely the most credible ones.”

This new generation has crystallized around a loose collective, more mood than movement, called La Souterraine. It translates literally as “the underground,” but it’s also named after a village of 5,000 people in Creuse, an underpopulated, economically isolated region in central France. Benjamin Caschera and Laurent Bajon founded La Souterraine in 2013, and although they’re keen to avoid defining the organization, it’s something akin to a non-profit record label: They release all their music—most notably a regular series of compilations—as free downloads. They have no business plan, no trademarks, no rigorous ideology; they chose the domain name souterraine.biz as an ironic nod to their lack of commercial motivation.