French musician and one half of the band AIR, Nicolas Godin, just released a new song in preparation for his second solo album. AIR, which is an acronym for “Amour, Imagination, Rêve” (love, imagination, dream), was originally a solo project by Godin, but after seeing a small bit of success he asked longtime friend and former bandmate, Jean-Benoît Dunckel, to join him. The duo’s debut album, Moon Safari, was Platinum in the United Kingdom and Certified Gold in France, their follow up album, The Virgin Suicides was the score to Sofia Coppola’s first movie which was titled the same as the album. The band went on to release five more studio albums as well as writing the score to the movie Music for Museum before Godin started recording his first solo LP.

Inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Nicolas Godin released his first studio album, Contrepoint via Because Music, on September 18th, 2015. Godin originally studied architechture at one of the top French architectural schools in the country, it was there where his musical interest starting taking over. Before founding AIR, Godin played in the band Orange with fellow schoolmates Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Alex Gopher, Xavier Jamaux, and Jean de Reydellet, with Dunckel eventually becoming the other half of AIR. When making Contrepoint, Godin was inspired by the work of of pianist Glenn Gould’s performances of Bach, each track even uses a different piece from Bach as a jumping off point. In a press release the founder of AIR goes on to say, “I’d made a statement with Air and I wanted to go back to the classical world, to grow up musically, to renew myself.”

Although his follow up album doesn’t have an official title or release date, he has given us something to look forward too with the release of his new single, “The Border.” Godin uses his architectural education for inspiration on this song stating that, ““I wrote this song thinking of the great architect Mies van der Rohe, he built the Barcelona pavilion in 1929 on the hill of Montjuic in Barcelona and this building swept away all the past of the history of architecture to open a new page of human history, making the world enter into modern architecture. In short, it’s the story of someone who asks some others to follow him to the Spanish border by the sea to show them a new path towards freedom and peace…leaving everything behind.” The track starts out with dark sounding synth before braking into a catchy drum pattern complimented by a groovy sounding base guitar. The track then opens up a new world of sounds with the use of cosmic sounding synthesizers and electronic sounding vocoders, equivalent to the lyrical story about the Spaniard leading others to a new world of freedom. You can hear Nicolas Godin’s new song below.