The French singer’s fantastical album Bon Voyage was delayed after she had a serious accident – one that she seemed to foretell in her own songwriting

It is easy to be cynical when musicians describe their work as a prophecy – as if writing something in a song could make it happen. But sometimes it works out that way. Nick Cave had written most of Skeleton Tree, laced with images of falling bodies and empty echoes, prior to the death of his son. Last spring, Melody Prochet was ready to release Bon Voyage, her second album as Melody’s Echo Chamber. But then the French musician suffered a serious accident that put her in hospital for months.

Despite being finished, the album felt eerily connected to Prochet’s experiences of injury and recovery. “So much blood on my hands,” she sang on Desert Horse. “Mama said you must be strong / Healing’s slow,” goes Breathe In, Breathe Out.

“It has always been mysterious how my lyrics have this long echo or pre-delay in my reality,” says Prochet. “It is something I have noticed before and I try not to interpret, because it’s too strange.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I couldn’t complain, but in my heart something felt wrong with the press and people’s reflections ’ ... Melody Prochet. Photograph: Diane Sagnier

Prochet answers questions over email, a policy of the few interviews she has agreed to. She can hear a donkey “screaming” and church bells chiming from the window of her home in a remote Provençal village. She won’t disclose what happened: it is nobody’s business but family and friends, she says, but one media outlet went digging for more information. “I think that’s very wrong and I have no idea where it came from.”

Her objection feels reasonable. Beyond the basic intrusion, women’s art has for too long been legitimised by their willingness to expose their pain. No artist should have to suffer to be taken seriously and Bon Voyage, now out on Domino, stands outside Prochet’s trauma. It creates a different world altogether, in fact: a lysergic fantasia as surprising as an anime landscape. Nods to Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson butt up against Swedish screaming, thanks to her Scandi collaborators, Dungen’s Reine Fiske and the Amazing’s Fredrik Swahn. Prochet calls the album an “adult promise to my inner child’s heart”.

Plus, she was accustomed to having her story stolen. Her self-titled debut, released in 2012, was produced by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, her then boyfriend. Most of the press focused on this detail, framing the record in the context of his catalogue and asking her what he was like. “I remember being as happy as I was frustrated,” says Prochet.

The acclaim for an artist at her level – underground even in France – was huge. She was grateful to Parker for his dedication. “I couldn’t complain, but in my heart something felt wrong with the press and people’s reflections. Maybe my only regret is that as a friend and producer he never acknowledged it and didn’t do anything to protect me or my work.”

For her second album, she found support from Flying Lotus, who let her record demos in his Los Angeles studio and declined to get involved because he said she did not need him. Tyler, the Creator reached out, too. But Bon Voyage was born in Stockholm. Seeking refuge from the “brutality” of Paris, Prochet moved to the suburb of Bagarmossen and worked with Fiske and Swahn in nearby Solna.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Melody’s Echo Chamber: Desert Horse – video

Their setup has been described as a woodsy idyll, although that is not quite the case. It was a hodgepodge of sessions grabbed when “reality, time, money” allowed. They worked in an industrial area, not a fairytale glade, with “shady businesses, junkie neighbours”. One morning they arrived as the studio was being robbed. “We were so scared they would come back that Swahn had to install some jail-like doors, which we hated doing,” Prochet says. “It was as punk as it was cosy and warm, a fabulous place to feel the freedom we lacked outside.”

They respected each other “so deeply that it couldn’t fail”, says Prochet, the process “absolutely restoring my confidence as a musician”. She felt trusted and enforced naps to allow everyone to digest their ideas. She went back to music school to learn drums – “it was so rewarding to hear the obvious progress” – and overcame her perfectionist streak to write violin arrangements with Fiske. She had always lacked self-belief, she says, although it was not helped by “some patronising and bullying behaviours in the music industry”.

After her accident, Prochet didn’t think Bon Voyage would ever come out. She credits her sister, Marika, with saving it. “It’s about the trauma and disillusion it caused me personally to become an adult woman in a mad world.” She doesn’t know if she will ever tour with the album – she is pregnant with her first child and needs “all my time and energy for love and building my family”. And she doesn’t know if there will be more music any time soon, either. Having spent months in a hospital bed, she is dreaming, from her Provençal village, of getting out and walking the world again.