Ani

Electronica / Downtempo / Lo-Fi / Trip-hop

July 2026 - Instrumental

Ani is Ubaye's fifth album — the Japanese word (兄) for "older brother", and a direct tribute to a musician sibling who died too young. It's by some distance the most personal record of the five, and the most consciously melancholic, made that way by intent rather than by accident.

It opens on Cicatrice — a scar, quiet and unhealed, setting the emotional register from the first note. From there the album pushes outward with real force: Origami, Atari, and Bécane form the loudest, most driven stretch on the record, almost as if trying to outrun the subject through sheer motion and noise. That momentum breaks on Joakim — softer, warmer, and clearly the most intimate track here, a name spoken directly rather than gestured at.

Intelligence artificielle is oddly heavy and dense for its clinical title, and La scène pushes back up into one of the loudest, most forceful moments on the album — grief performed in public rather than processed in private. Masque keeps that intensity going, fittingly, a mask held up mid-performance. Eivissa and Ipanema offer a strange, almost defiant detour into brightness and escape, holiday imagery dropped into the middle of a mourning record, before the album arrives at its true center of gravity: Basta, by far the longest and most spacious track here, its title — "enough," in Italian and Spanish — landing like an exhausted, cathartic exhale after everything before it.

After that release, the record turns inward and settles. Ikigai — a reason for living — and Nous — "us" — are both hushed and gentle, searching for meaning and connection rather than volume. Hémoglobine stays low and warm, blood as both wound and bond, and Lacrimosa arrives as the album's most explicit reckoning with grief, borrowing its name from the "weeping" movement of the requiem mass. Tendre banlieue softens further, a tender, specific place rather than an abstract feeling. The album closes on Jacques II — the quietest, most dynamically open track on the record, ending not with a climax but with something private and unresolved, like a conversation trailing off rather than finishing.

Structurally, Ani moves in a wide, defiant arc: wound, flight, a named moment of tenderness, a loud false escape, a long collapse into Basta, and then a slow, searching descent into quiet. It's less linear than Komorebi, less settled than Serre-Ponçon, and considerably heavier than anything Ubaye has released before.

Tracklisting:

1 - Cicatrice

2 - Origami

3 - Atari

4 - Bécane

5 - Joakim

6 - Intelligence artificielle

7 - La scène

8 - Masque

9 - Eivissa

10 - Ipanema

11 - Basta

12 - Ikigai

13 - Nous

14 - Hémoglobine

15 - Lacrimosa

16 - Tendre banlieue

17 - Jacques II

Album cover: based on a photograph taken in a port in Ibiza and stylized in a cartoon manner.