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With the appearance of L'oeil au centre de l'oeil, La STPO—La Société des Timides à la Parade des Oiseaux—reaffirms its status as one of French experimental music’s best-kept secrets. Emerging from the fertile artistic ground of 1980s Rennes and now approaching four decades of activity, La STPO has cultivated a distinctive sound rooted in a collision of dadaism, surrealism, and avant-rock traditions. The band’s approach is more akin to constructing mental theatre than composing conventional rock songs: fragments of imagery, warped poetic lines, and abrupt shifts in rhythm and timbre suggest the logic of dreams rather than linear storytelling.

In L'oeil au centre de l'oeil, structural concision and instrumental diversity reign supreme; brief but densely orchestrated pieces are woven from electric guitars, xylophones, brass, woodwinds, and odd percussion, drawing on the group’s history of shifting membership and collaborative elasticity. The current lineup—anchored by Pascal Godjikian, Patrice Babin, JimB, Christophe Gautheur, and Benoît Delaune—continues to work with a palette that includes everything from metallic percussion to balafon, with wildly inventive vocal deliveries that blur the lines between music and theatre. The album’s textures move restlessly from burlesque cityscapes to intimate chamber abstractions, never lingering long enough to settle but always precise in their construction.