I can first admit that it was the brothers Dewaele that brought me to this album. Those of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs, whose label DeeWee released the album, as well as the pair’s previous EP. If it were not for the co-sign of these two electro gatekeepers, I can mostly guarantee I wouldn’t have given Topical Dancer the hours upon days I’ve spent with it. Admitting here that I would have dismissed this album if it weren’t for the adjacency to two other men I adore feels necessary. At its core, Topical Dancer is asking its listener to address their biases, using dance pop as a means to break through otherwise difficult subject matter. I have nothing in common with the artists, and I can easily admit I would have dismissed the album, and yet here I am trying to spin these words into a message about how important this album feels to me.

Topical Dancer’s second track, after a short opening skit, is “Esperanto.” A jolting anthem with a bass line that rises and falls like a yo-yo. And Adigery wastes no time bludgeoning the listener with questions. “Are you polite or political? Are you correct or cynical? Are you as open-minded behind closed doors?”. Those are the first three lines of the entire album, and through Adigery’s somehow breathless yet angled voice, they set the stage for what’s to come. Later on in the track, Adigery addresses privilege, now through the lens of power. “Do you see this guilt as leverage?” she asks. 

Why do I have guilt? Why does it feel necessary to admit aloud that I am not like the artists? What does it mean for the venn diagram of human experience of Charlotte Adigery and Erik Burg to essentially be two separate circles? What do I gain by recognizing that? I don’t think I’m special for finding a kinship with this album. I don’t see my enjoyment of the album as a cis-white-male, a line that I think even Adigery herself would roll her eyes at, as “leverage.” What makes Topical Dancer a brilliant piece of art is that it asks its subjects to interact with extremely heavy topics. But they are topics; racism, sexuality, politics, et al, that ultimately intersect with human nature. Shared opinions, like them or not. Is being polite not also political in some way?

40 seconds later, still on “Esperanto,” Adigery begins to present a solution to imagined social situations. “Don’t say ‘nice pair’, say ‘ I love the symmetry of you’” and “Don’t say ‘white people can’t dance’, say ‘Tom marches to the beat of a different drum’”. On what amounts to the album’s opening track, the duo swings from asking the listener to examine their privilege, to eye rolling about why you shouldn’t order a black americano. What Adigery & Pupul achieve on “Esperanto” is a microcosm of scenes throughout Topical Dancer. It is at times both deeply serious and comedic. It is performative and expressive, the entirety of which is backed by percussive club and pop production.

Topical Dancer gains a great deal effect from that juxtapostion of serious, albeit sometimes tongue in cheek, topics and the absolutely sterling production mix. It’s pop by way of techno, the forte of Ghent-based Soulwax who produced a number of track on the album. It feels subversive in a lot of ways. A track like “It Hit Me,” about teenage sexual realization and a sort of coming-of-age awkwardness. Stories about trying to mimic tips from Cosmo or using your dad’s acqua di gio. The whole song is set to what could best be described as a late night club smash. The sounds are reminiscence of European warehouses: abrasive, loud and charged. “It Hit Me” is the hardest the album goes on pure techno, but the longer I’ve spent with the album it’s the song I’ve come back to most often. Compare it to “Reappropriate,” which sounds like it could have been produced by Jamie XX or James Blake, a much softer track that mesmerizes with a looping, twinkling synthesizer. Even if it does bounce from micro genre to micro genre, the whole album has a kind of synesthtetic flow that makes time melt away. Adigery’s voice is both conversational and sharply pointed, both in words and tone. There’s no better example than on the album’s closing track “Thank You,” which is six minutes of Adigery sarcastically telling someone “thank you.” “Couldn’t have done this without you, and your opinion,” she sings, met with the chorus refrain “oh thank you.”

In May I’ll drive some 4 hours to watch these two perform in Chicago. I’m partially curious to see what it would even look like, how you make a song like “HAHA” come alive on stage. It would almost be appropriate for one to tell a joke to the other, leaning into the mic with a deadpan “I guess you had to be there,” and moving on to the next item on the setlist. Regardless of how the stage interprets the album, I’m just excited to share a space with these two. Because ultimately Topical Dancer makes Adigery & Pupul feel so human. And that makes the album come alive, authoring a connection with somebody like myself. There’s honesty on tracks like “It Hit Me” or “Reappropriate.” There’s black comedy on “Thank You” and “Esperanto”. There’s the pure id of “Ceci N’est Pas Un Cliche” and “HAHA.”

At a most personal level, I really appreciate this album’s ability to be both funny and empathetic. It’s what made me come back to it again and again. It’s what inspired me to write… whatever this is. To collect these words that are tantamount to a “thank you” to all the artists involved. At this very moment, in my small corner of the world, I’m more isolated than I’ve ever been. But I’m also more okay with that than I’ve ever been. Topical Dancer allows me to feel less alone, though. And for that reason alone I adore it. As Adigery sings on “Making Sense Stop,” “You need to welcome your intuition / make room for your own subconscious mind / the liberty of saying nothing / but also really meaning it / words are my refuge, silence is scary.”