A night in Paris with Jersey, the next great French dance duo

Aside from a four-piece guitar band in Liverpool, a French dance duo is possibly the most baggage-laden musical project it’s possible to create. Brothers Carl and Renaud Amiard weren’t too bothered about the shadow cast by their robotic forebears when they started making dance music together, though. In fact, they thought it was all pretty uncool.

It’s a natural thing for teenagers to reject the culture of their parents’ generation that surrounds them when growing up, instead idolising that which is just out of reach. For the Amiard brothers, who grew up all over France but frequently spent summers in their parents’ hometown in coastal Normandy, that culture reached them via stolen radio waves.

Only a few miles off that Normandy coast sits the Channel Island of Jersey, which would transmit British radio that, somewhat accidentally, could be picked up by Carl and Renaud on their summer holidays. “English radio came with this idea that it is better [across the Channel],” Carl tells Rolling Stone UK. “The music is not the same.”

Such was the impact of hearing the likes of The Prodigy, Muse, Radiohead and Massive Attack that the brothers named their new project after the island that floated the music to them across the water.

Rolling Stone UK meets Jersey in Paris, the city the brothers have called home for the last decade. In that time, they have gone from playing in guitar bands that were “a mix of The White Stripes and The Prodigy” – a humorously large sonic gap – to the buoyant and sample-heavy dance music they now make together. “Every time we tried a new formation of a rock band, it was always with this idea of playing live,” Carl explains. “It’s where we come from; we have to play something on the stage.”

This ethos has given Jersey their tagline-slash-motto: “Nothing’s fake, everything’s live.” Later that night, the pair play the launch party for debut album Nothing’s Fake at the sweaty and storied La Maroquinerie venue, sticking stridently to their catchphrase.

Stood in front of a horseshoe of synths and surrounded by a delightfully energetic crowd, the pair play dance music with the energy of a rock band. Every sample on their catchy house tunes is triggered by hand, and they frantically dash between instruments and knock into each other like siblings playfighting on the living room carpet as kids.

This energy and crowd interaction is also what gave Jersey their viral break online. With sets taking place in friends’ living rooms and on the streets of Paris, chaos was the key ingredient. “We play music until someone breaks our synths” goes the title of a YouTube video of one show that is currently on more than a million views.

“We did some cool stuff on the social,” Renaud reflects, “but really quickly we wanted to share it with real people in a real place. In a way, we made the album to play it live. We just had to use internet for it because that’s the case for everyone now.”

Jersey started to pay attention to electronic music around the time of the EDM boom, which brought with it largely tedious conversations around authenticity and what constitutes a real band, song, or performance. They specifically reference a famous 2008 photo of another French dance duo, Justice, which appeared to show band member Gaspard Augé ‘playing’ an unplugged drum machine. (As Augé later explained, the cable had simply fallen out mid-performance at the exact time the photos in question were taken.) In an age of AI, the question is coming back around again, as Carl posits: “We have to live with this question now: is it fake or not?”

While making it very clear that they are playing everything live on stage, Jersey play with the idea of the surreal through their visual presentation. During our conversation, Renaud whips out one of the masks that the pair routinely wear in promo photos and on their album cover, featuring mangled and distorted versions of their faces. “We have lots of different ones if we want to change our expression,” he deadpans while tucking a mask of himself with a twisted smile back into his pocket. Later, at La Maroquinerie, fans don the admittedly creepy masks to dance wildly next to the brothers as they frantically bash away at their mountain of synths.

Though they initially ran from the dance music legacy of their homeland, the influence of Daft Punk, Justice and French touch did eventually reach the brothers. “We’re more inspired than we thought by these bands,” Renaud admits, though the inspiration is incorporated into Jersey less as an earnest pastiche and instead with a knowing wink.

The pair will often be seen at gigs in spoof Daft Punk t-shirts featuring their own band name, or releasing a ludicrously fun and frantic cover of Phoenix classic ‘1901’. “We’re linked with this kind of group,” Renaud says. “We listened to them a lot during our teenage years, and now that we’re travelling around the world, we feel even more linked to them.”

While pertinent and valid questions surround the album’s ethos of surreality and truth or lack thereof, to dwell on them would be to ignore just how raucously fun it is to listen to Jersey or see them live. At the Paris gig, they turn a drizzly Wednesday night into a year-defining party and leave absolutely everything out on the floor.

Along with their own hits – the insatiable pop-house of ‘Obsessed’; the anthemic heart-tugger ‘Talk Tonight’ – they play a preposterous cover of MGMT’s ‘Kids’ and never let the crowd (or themselves) forget that, in the end, none of it is that deep. “It’s not the most serious thing,” Renaud concurs. “It has to stay funny.”

Other Jersey shows have seen the pair blast out the iconic Millennial staple of the EA Sports soundbite on a sample pad, while Renaud gleefully continues a decades-long bit of delighting crowds with a rendition of The Lord of the Rings soundtrack staple ‘Concerning Hobbits’. Way before Jersey started, he would stand in as a session player for friends’ projects and routinely play that melody between every song at gigs. “The singer was always a bit annoyed,” he says before howls of laughter.

The main aim now, they both agree, is the same as it was when they were children: to excite each other and to make your brother laugh. Nothing could be more real than that.