Music The album "Shifting Forms" is Elie Zoé's introverted new beginning
Elie Zoé releases his fourth album - and the first after his gender reassignment. In "Shifting Forms", the Lausanne-based singer and musician offers introverted songs that tie in with his earlier ones.
10.10.2025, 10:31
SDA
Elie Zoé sits in a café in Yverdon-les-Bains with a broad smile. The artist, who was known as Emilie Zoé, made his gender reassignment and name change public in an interview with the newspaper "Le Temps" in October last year. Much has changed and much has remained the same: The songs on his new album continue to combine poppy vocal melodies with drums and rock guitar, very much in the spirit of his earlier works.
Zoé began writing the songs for "Shifting Forms" in early 2024, right after the "Hello Future Me" tour (2022), "which was fantastic", as he says.
Learning to sing again
At the end of the tour, he took a break from performing to relearn how to sing after his gender reassignment. He changed the tonality of his old songs, he explains.
He says of his regained voice: "I have the impression that I can sing more calmly and find more subtle nuances than before. He points to the vocal expansion that enables him to sing both high and low notes. For him, "recording vocals has never been so easy", he says, radiating a confidence that is reflected in the album.
Like the previous albums "Dead End Tape" (2016), "The Very Start" (2018) and "Hello Future Me" (2022), "Shifting Forms" was also produced by Louis Jucker from Humus Records. At the same time as Elie Zoé was getting used to his new voice, he and Jucker, to whom he feels a brotherly bond, built a recording studio from used materials on the Humus Records site in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The two-month recording session took place in the summer of 2024.
Relationships with other beings
"Shifting Forms" is an album that is both introspective and universal. In the nine songs, it questions relationships with other living beings. Not only with people, but also with animals and plants.
In order to explore the personal journey and that of every living being, Elie Zoé has immersed himself in anthropology and biology - an interest he has long harbored, not least because he studied natural sciences. His family also has a close relationship with nature, he says.
This gave rise to the lyrics of the songs: "For me, writing songs is a different, perhaps more intuitive way of approaching these questions," he says. "It's the quietest record I've written, and also the most luminous," Zoé continues. One example of this is the ballad "dormant plants", with Sara Oswald accompanying Zoé's voice on the cello. "I think there's something fantastic about music: it touches the emotions in us directly, almost without the detour via our thoughts," comments the musician.
The track "change my name", which was released as a single, is particularly important to him personally. "It's a song full of contrasts," says Zoé. In the first part, his voice booms with guitar riffs, the second part is quiet and the artist's family and friends can be heard in the chorus - audio excerpts that they have sent him and that have been added. "I think it sums up this idea of shifting forms," says Zoé.
Guitar, drums and vocals
The instrumentation of the whole album is simple: a duo of guitar and drums, sometimes also a piano. Zoé plays electric guitar - his favorite instrument - and piano. Luc Hess (Coilguns) played the drums. The album was recorded live. Incidentally, Fred Bürki from Bern has been providing the beat on tour for several years now.
Elie Zoé is looking forward to the upcoming start of the tour with a double album release: on Friday (October 10) at Les Docks in Lausanne and on Saturday (October 11) at Bogen F in Zurich, where the vernissage of the previous album has already taken place.
https://eliezoe.com/
