Montreal duo Milk & Bone make music that seems to inhabit life’s little dramas and unexpected memories.
The characters in their songs sip on coconut water and wonder if their unrequited crushes will ever pan out; they savor simple, satisfying, lustful days. With these small intimacies—made more intimate by the duo’s crystal clear voices and restrained piano melodies, I imagine all of it unfolding in some sunlit Montreal loft. Their album Little Mourning, which is out March 17th in Canada and March 31 in the US, it sounds almost as if the whole thing could have been made in a few carefree afternoons, the two of them playing piano as warm air blows in through an open window and sweeps up the gauzy curtains.
“We tend to write more songs that are true and raw,” Laurence Lafond-Beaulne, “I think that people like that. I think that people want to hear the truth even when the truth is not that pretty. I think it feels good to hear, and it feels good to write.”
Milk & Bone, are Lafond-Beaulne and her collaborator Camille Poliquin who performed standing at keyboards angled to slightly face each other, wearing all black outfits that matched their black hair. Lafond-Beaulne, who performs stage left and is distinguishable by her bangs, pulled out a ukulele for a couple songs, using that instrument’s spare sound to her advantage. Poliquin played a drum pad, adding staggering riffs of bass, and she stunned the room into silence with her soaring vocal solo at the end of “New York.”
Milk & Bone’s formula is simple: It’s pretty much just pianos, vocal harmonies, and lurching groans of electronic bass and drums that hint at skeletal interpretations of dance music. But it’s totally current, and, in the way that it makes those pristine voices the focus, The duo’s music is immediate and earnest, and it sticks with you as a result. The songs are about, as Poliquin explained, “trust and lust and friendship.” The arresting album opener, “Elephant,” for instance, begins with the matter-of-fact line “his skin is warm, and my lips are starving” before rounding out that feeling with context: “I want you babe, and I won’t stop asking / Just one more night with you is all I’m wanting.”
“Some songs I wrote, it was really just a way of ending past stories,” Lafond-Beaulne said. “To put an end to it, and it really helped.”
The two met as students in the music program at Saint-Laurent, a French-speaking college that’s part of Quebec’s CEGEP system, which students go to between high school and college. Lafond-Beaulne, who grew up reluctantly studying piano before becoming obsessed with classical trombone in high school, entered for jazz trombone but switched to jazz singing. Eventually she’d take up electric bass as well and start touring in French-speaking rock acts. One of these was David Giguère, in whose band she performed alongside Poliquin. About a year and a half ago, another local artist, Misteur Valaire, brought them into the studio to record together as lead vocalists, and they recognized an immediate chemistry, prompting them to start writing together.
“She has amazing creative ideas in the studio,” Lafond-Beaulne said of Poliquin. “I think sometimes I’m still kind of impressed by the studio thing, and I get kind of insecure to just let go. And when she goes in the booth and improvises, it’s beautiful, and it inspires me and helps me move forward and go ‘OK, I can do that too.’” Lafond-Beaulne, on the other hand, brings the group more of the sensitive energy that makes their songs so captivating.
Both are young—Poliquin is 22, and Lafond-Beaulne is 24—and correspondingly earnest, but they have a considerable depth and maturity to their character as well. Each of those qualities comes across in their songwriting, which is candid and sincere,
“I think we’re not afraid of talking about the dark side of relationships,” Lafond-Beaulne said. She added, “People need true… When we live with something, I tend to internalize it and not really talk about it.” When asked if these songs were about specific people in their lives, both singers laughed and reassured me, “oh yeah.”
Those truths are already connecting. Each of Milk & Bone’s tracks has accrued more attention than the last, with their most recent song, “Pressure,” accumulating more than 300,000 plays on Soundcloud even prior to the album release. Poliquin and Lafond-Beaulne may be approachable and humble about their impressive chops, but their ambitions are unmistakably pop. Although both grew up speaking French, English is every bit as natural, and making songs in English was the obvious choice for pure accessibility. They’ve been deliberate in the way they present themselves, and they’ve been approaching their role as a band with a level of professionalism that’s uncanny for most acts their size.
The Fat Angel Sings 