Dominique Fils-Aimé starts her new album with her mother.
An old cassette from the 1970s. Her mother, Claudette Thomas, singing a melody written by Patricia Carli and Léon Missir. No gloss, no framing, just a voice travelling across decades. A soft acoustic guitar joins it, then ocean waves, chanting, a low gong that seems to vibrate under your ribs. By the time Fils-Aimé steps in, My World Is the Sun has already set the terms.
This record doesn’t resist analysis so much as make it feel beside the point. The arrangements are precise and the musicianship is assured, but the feeling never gets buried under either. Much of it was recorded live at Studios Opus in L’Assomption, and you can hear that. There’s space between the instruments. Air around the piano. The trumpet appears briefly, then fades. A bass line leans forward for a few bars and slips back. Bassist and producer Jacques Roy handled the mixing and engineering, and he clearly understood that the room was part of the sound.
Fils-Aimé has been building toward this kind of record for a while. Her breakout on La Voix led to a trilogy of albums that worked through jazz, blues and soul with increasing confidence, and earned her Polaris recognition and Junos nominations along the way. My World Is the Sun feels like the moment she stopped proving anything. Where her earlier work sometimes announced its influences, this one simply uses them. Our Roots Run Deep, her 2023 album, was ambitious and richly arranged but carried the weight of its own statements. This record is warmer and more personal, and takes more risks with structure and space.
On The River, pianist David Osei Afrifa plays with a patience that gives Fils-Aimé room to stretch her phrasing until words lose their edges. Percussionist Elli Miller Maboungou and tabla player Shawn Mativetsky pull certain tracks toward something West African and South Asian in feel without it ever sounding like a fusion exercise. These are textures in service of mood, not credentials on display. Hichem Khalfa’s trumpet shows up a few times and disappears before you can get a fix on it.
The album does have a sameness of tempo that occasionally works against it. Several mid-album tracks share a similar meditative pace, and without a sharp contrast to push against, the attention can drift before Rhythm of Nature arrives to anchor things. That nine-minute track, captured in a single take with executive producer Kevin Annocque on didgeridoo underneath layered voices, justifies the patience the album asks for. It’s the kind of track that doesn’t make sense on paper and lands completely in practice.
On Phoenix Rising, she sings, “Fire rain down on me.” It could tip into theatre. She doesn’t let it. The arrangement swells gently, leaving you with a mix of joy and grief that doesn’t sort itself out. Freedom Become moves closer to prayer, repeating lines like “May our thoughts gather as one.” It could easily veer into hollow uplift. It doesn’t, because she doesn’t oversell it.
Life Remains might be the one that sticks longest. There’s a looseness to it, a reminder to let a moment exist without picking it apart. The album closes with the outro returning to her mother’s melody, then a bonus track, a cover of Francis Cabrel’s Je t’aimais, je t’aime et je t’aimerai, accompanied only by pianist Camille Gélinas. It’s quieter and more private than the rest of the record, and it earns its place at the end.
Over the past two years, Fils-Aimé has played more than 150 shows across 15 countries. You can hear that in this music. Not exhaustion. Confidence. She sounds like someone who knows exactly how much to give and when to pull back.
It’s jazz, soul, blues, but spending too long on the taxonomy misses the point. This is a record that rewards patience and punishes distraction.
Her mother’s voice opens the door. Fils-Aimé closes the circle herself at the end. Not dramatic. Just complete.
My World Is the Sun will be released on February 20 via Ensoul Records.
Photo – Vladim Vilain
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