In lesser hands, the refrain of Christine and the Queens’ latest single could land as petulant or performatively blue —“People, I’ve been sad!” is the type of thing your neediest friend tweets before being met with a barrage of heart emojis—but Chris finds real intimacy in the declaration. Over the type of slow-burning, fluorescent synth-pop that has become her bread and butter (her pain et beurre?), the singer confirms her concealed wounds: “It’s true that people, I’ve been missing out,” she sings, enunciating every word with surgical precision, “And missing out for way too long.” It’s the kind of external admission—clipped, unflinching—that disguises introspective rigor, especially when paired with Chris’ other regrets: She’s on the verge of disappearing now, after having “forsaken things for way too long.”

“People, I’ve been sad” is Héloïse Adelaïde Letissier’s first single since “Gone,” her summer BDSM barnstormer with Charli XCX, but it shares more with the quieter moments of her 2018 record Chris: call-and-response vocals, gently and robotically stacked in chorus, as well as dramatic mastery of pauses and hesitant space. In her native French, she mourns a difficult childhood with imagistic lines about dead thistles and walking on glass barefoot. A warm, empathetic string section surges below her, as if to say her resilience and beauty are one and the same. The private nature of the track feels genuine and striking; tellingly, it was written, arranged, and produced only by Letissier, who gently rides its momentum without offering any easy, grand resolutions. The song merely ends, a bit stronger now than when it began.

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