BLUE BOYS CLUB: Electro-Punk-Maxxing Corporate Exhaustion

A caricature of the career ladder, with burnout waiting at the top. 23 minutes of frantic madness that, like micromanagement, puts you through the corporate meat grinder. The exaggeration seems glaringly obvious, but anyone who’s ever scrolled through the LinkedIn hellscape knows: it’s not all that far from reality.

RELAX, the debut EP by the Parisian trio BLUE BOYS CLUB, reconstructs the modern corporate world. Everything is part of the concept, from the musicians’ outfits to the artwork. And so we follow a fictional character who becomes increasingly lost and strange in this corporate exhaustion. Even when this character checks out and books a flight, nothing changes.

However, all this obliviousness and dreariness is set to a sound that turns the pseudo-inspiring open-plan office into a dance floor. Good mood is mandated by management. There’s a sense of the utter corporate weirdness seen in the TV series Severance.

The explosive songs and interludes follow one another in frantic succession. There’s no room to escape the rat race. And even in the title track, RELAX, everything feels more like a performance than something that actually works. The EP is the soundtrack to hustle culture. A modern take on The Emperor’s New Clothes, Finance Bro Edition.

And therein lies the EP’s ingenuity: the band places reality on a pedestal, illuminating it neatly to reveal its absurdity in all its glory. BLUE BOYS CLUB do not preach. No wagging finger, just a mirror held up to society… and a hideous grimace staring back at us.

Because the critique is buried under a thick layer of exaggeration, it’s easy to dissociate yourself from the satire. No wonder, then, that the marketing chaps at Oatly came knocking at the band’s door to use their viral hit MATCHA LATTE for a TikTok video. The irony is biting: a corporation co-opting a satire of hollow corporate culture.

But if you just ignore the crass satire, what remains of the six songs is, above all, ecstasy—with catchy pop melodies, harsh guitars, synthetic glitches and euphoric beats. BLUE BOYS CLUB are practising something akin to ‘electro-punk-maxxing’ here. It pops, whirrs and booms from start to finish.

It’s downright audacious just how good these tracks are in their maximalist aesthetic, while still offering surprising twists: the soulful bridge in DEAD FACE, the singing-bowl-infused opener of RELAX, strongly reminiscent of Personal Jesus, and the instructions for a Margherita in OOO, delivered emotionlessly by a computerised voice.

But the EP deliberately withholds a satisfying conclusion for this fictional character and the caricatured universe. He does not transform; in the end, he is still the man with the dead face, only now he is lying on the beach. The mask remains, and nothing is hidden behind it. An empty shell, defined solely by consumerism and the corporate culture. The incarnation of a buzzword that has long since lost its meaning.