As debuts go, this one feels like a flare shot into a crowded sky. After years in a celebrated collective, Marlon Magnée has made a solo statement that is loud, lean, and unafraid to bare its fangs. Rock may never have left. But on Dark Star, it sounds newly unchained. For fifteen years, Marlon Magnée crisscrossed the globe as a driving force behind La Femme, peddling a chic cocktail of supercool and surf-soaked futurism. Now he steps out alone with Dark Star, a debut side project that electrifies like a voltage surge straight from the source.

If La Femme flirted with retro decorations, Dark Star rips the wallpaper down. Magnée reconnects with his earliest obsessions, stitching together rockabilly, punk, cold wave chill, and a streak of psychedelic psychobilly that moves like a motorcycle weaving through a neon tunnel. Sung in both French and English, the album is a bilingual brawl. Sixties guitars jangle and slash while what Magnée calls an “orgy of synths” straight out of the Eighties flood the mix. Drum machines pound with mechanical precision. Analog delays smear the edges. The energy is unbound, as if the tape might combust before the chorus hits.

The lineage is proudly displayed. You can hear the art damaged cool of the Velvet Underground in the minimal menace, the wiry snarl of the Stranglers in the basslines, and the leather jacket velocity of Motörhead in the speed trials. There are flashes of the Cure’s nocturnal moods and even the flash of classic Stray Cats. Magnée also tips his hat to French language provocateurs. The louche poetry of Serge Gainsbourg, the art pop of Les Rita Mitsouko, and the punk shock of Métal Urbain flicker through the album’s DNA. It feels like a musical collision, a jukebox shoved down a staircase that explodes on impact.

Produced with Renaud Letang at Paris’ storied Studio Ferber, Dark Star sounds both careful and feral at the same time. Letang doesn’t attempt to sand down the edges, but looks to frame the chaos and give Magnée’s instincts room to create the canvas. What emerges is a restless record conceived, in Magnée’s words, “for those with blood in their hearts and the urge to fight back.” There’s defiance in the grooves, but also joy.