This week we look to the band Lemâitre for inspiration, focusing on four EP albums in one post for the week, as opposed to two albums in two posts. Ketil Jansen and Ulrik Denizou Lund make up the duo that is Lemâitre, and although they only began releasing albums in 2010, they have already released 6 relatively short albums. In an interview with Duncan Cooper, from thefader.com, Jansen and Lund explain how they came to calling themselves Lemâitre:

“You’re a Norwegian group with a French-sounding name—but it’s a made-up French word, right? No, actually it’s the name of a Belgian priest, astronomer and physics professor who was amongst the first people to propose the Big Bang theory in 1927. His name was Georges Lemaître. Ketil read about it in a book, appropriately calledThe Big Bang. The word also means “the master” or “maestro” in French, but we were unaware of that at the time. We wrote it down on a list for possible band names, but landed on Lemâitre in the end. The ^ is actually supposed to be on top of the ‘i’, but we misspelled it and only found out when some French friends put us right. Facebook won’t let us change the spelling now, so we’re kind of stuck with it, but it’s a decent icebreaker so we don’t mind too much. Luckily, we feel we ended up with a pretty good name as the others we had written down were pretty goddamn awful, for example Pope of Dope, and Oceanic 815.”

Like the life work of their namesake, Lemâitre’s sound, although still partially guitar driven, has a very spacey/atmospheric indie electronic dream pop. One key element to Lemâitre’s sound is the heavy, driving synthesizers that give their songs a huge musical presence. The strong, simple beat of the song greatly adds to the presence with their heavy use of the simple quarter note beats in their 4/4 time signature. This simple beat and heavy use of guitars is what differentiates Lemâitre from similar groups such as Ratatat, who uses a similar driving synthesizers and has similar lyrical elements. Because of these key elements in Lemâitre’s sound, they have successfully written their own little spot on the indie dream pop genre.