“I am much more inspired by a natural environment than by everyday life in the city.”
Enric Font designs wind farms by day and songs by night. Engineer by profession, musician by instinct, Lecocq posted a few months ago “Sucre” (Satélite K, 26), a second pop album between luminosity and melancholy that explores how the teenager we were continues to inhabit the adult we are.
(Lecocq will be performing on September 26 at the Fabra i Coats venue in Barcelona, within the BAM-Acció Cultura Viva programming)
Lecocq He is an energy engineer. He likes his job. Now he is involved in a whole project, that of the Rosas Wind Farm: three floating wind turbines that will be installed in front of the bay of this town on the Costa Brava. Being from Empordà, he says it with a small mouth, due to the many criticisms and controversy that the project has generated. But, still, yes, he really likes his job. “I am not in an industrial chain”. Lecocq He is Enric Font and, we said, he is an energy engineer. He also composes great songs. The latest, signature pop with a danceable impulse following in the footsteps of Phoenix, LCD Soundsystem or Daft Punk from “Random Access Memories”, He has included them in his second album, “Sucre”an album that revolves around the concept of how the teenager we were ends up modeling the adult we are.
“There is a certain concept behind the album about how difficult it sometimes is to adapt to adult life”
It’s Friday morning. When we finish the interview, he will catch the train to go to the town, La Bisbal de l’Empordà, to help his father in the field. At home they are reapers. He has done it his entire life, from when the season began at the beginning of June until it ended at the end of August. “I hated when summer came. All my friends went to play or to the pool or to the beach and I went to work in the country, every day, without excuses, sixteen or seventeen hours. Now we have romanticized it a lot, all this life in the country, and it’s nice, but it was very hard”. He says it without harboring past traumas. In fact, he explains to me that he is restoring an old house from the 1700s where his family once kept agricultural machinery. “I want to plant olive groves and vineyards. Everything will come. First we have to rehabilitate it.” Although (for now) he lives in Barcelona (everything will come), it is in La Bisbal where he composes. “I am much more inspired by a natural environment than by everyday life in the city. Here it is like living perpetually on a Blue Monday. In the town there is something intangible that is much more genuine.”
Yes Vic is the Catalan Liverpool, La Bisbal de l’Empordà is Manchester. From there have emerged some of the most interesting projects on the Catalan music scene of the last twenty years: Mazoni, Sanjosex, The Gramophone AllStars, Fetus, b1n0 and Lecocqclear. “All this musical movement that existed in La Bisbal influenced me, but later. My first contact with music was through my mother’s family, in France. I have an uncle who was a pianist who came to play with Édith Piaf”. His first project was Medusa Box, a band with which Enric pretended to be our own Julian Casablancas. “I could have met him. I was in the United States with my friends from Cala Vento. We hadn’t slept for twenty-eight hours and the Hinds called us to tell us that in a while they would give us the address of an after-party where he would be. I went to sleep. I was so knackered that I preferred to go out to drink than chat with Julian Casablancas.” Among his achievements with Medusa Box is recording highly recommended albums such as “I Love Astronomy”. But that ended. Enric remembers those years with a certain nostalgia, for the good times he had with his friends, but admitting that there came a time when he wanted to move forward without having to drag anyone behind him. That happened in 2024, when he published his debut solo album under the name Lecocq, “Sous la Glace/Sota el Gel”. Two years later, with the EP “Volaille/Aviram” (25) in between, expand the legacy with “Sucre”.
“Sucre” was born in a creative retreat that Enric did in the apartment that a friend left him in a small town in the Pyrenees. “A fascinating thing happened to me. I had been composing and recording for about twenty-four hours straight. I had finished one of the songs, ‘Nid d’oiseau’, which talks about birds. I put on the demo that I had made to listen to it and, when it was finished, on the notebook in which I write the lyrics, there were two pens that I had not left behind. I didn’t know where they had come from. It was a very paranoid moment. I picked up everything and left. There are moments, when you start to create, “You focus all your attention on it and the rest disappears. I still don’t know how those feathers got there, but that’s what happened.”
To make the album, Enric created a playlist that he shared with Emili Bosch, one of his former cronies in Medusa Box, currently fifty percent of b1n0, and producer of “Sucre”. “It wasn’t to copy ideas, it was to focus on sounds”. That list highlighted the collaboration between Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers. There were also various LCD Soundsystem songs. The compilation continued along those same lines. And the truth is that that danceable pop sound, which also refers to proposals like that of the French Phoenix or the funkier Beck, permeates the first half of the album. Radiation and luminosity that darkens in the second part of the album. “Sucre” (a work in which, as he did on his first album, Lecocq combines the use of Catalan and French in its repertoire) begins during the day and ends at night. “It is intentional,” admits. “There is a certain concept behind the album about how difficult it sometimes is to adapt to adult life with the commitments that it entails. It advances with that idea, from the euphoria of when you are young to the complications that appear as the years go by.” That and Enric is a night owl. “I don’t know if I’m a night owl, but I lived in Estonia for a while and I really enjoyed the time when the nights were almost endless. The sun hardly appeared for two or three hours and I felt very comfortable. Yes, the night pulls me more than the day.”
