Let’s start with a paradox: "Porcelain" is anything but delicate. It cracks, chips, and clangs; it’s the sound of fragility weaponized - a teacup hurled through a Marshall stack. Sarah and Nico, the volcanic duo behind Pamplemousse, seem to have distilled the entire post-grunge hangover into nine compact detonations recorded once again with Peter Deimel at the Black Box - a place that’s become to noise what Abbey Road was to pop: sacred ground for distortion.

Pamplemousse’s story is already legend on their native Réunion Island - a place better known for its beaches than for feedback and fury. Born in 2016 as a trio, the band’s evolution into a duo has only made them sound more dangerous, more distilled. There’s a strange kind of intimacy in their violence now: the drum hits are like heartbeats in arrhythmia; the guitar riffs, crooked love letters written with a soldering iron.

"Porcelain" continues the band’s progression from "High Strung" and "Think of It" - but what once felt like raw, sweaty catharsis now carries a layer of uneasy clarity. “More Beautiful Than Madonna” opens the record like a slap of irony and joy - the sound of a band laughing at their own destruction. “Smile the Num” and “Miami Blue” stretch between menace and melancholy, where Nico’s vocals slide between a snarl and a confession. Then there’s “Bad Penny”, perhaps their most perfectly unhinged pop moment, a two-and-a-half-minute anthem for anyone who’s ever smiled while falling apart.

What’s striking about "Porcelain" is its sense of proportion. Everything teeters on the edge - the production is precise, the chaos rehearsed but never domesticated. Sarah’s drumming doesn’t so much keep time as threaten it, while Nico’s guitar playing sounds like it’s trying to chew its way out of its own amp. And yet, amid all the abrasion, there’s something beautiful: melody hiding inside the feedback, like a shard of porcelain glinting in rubble.

Thematically, "Porcelain" feels like a document of reinvention. After moving from the tropics of Réunion to the industrial greys of Lorraine, Pamplemousse seem to have found a new temperature - less humid, more electric. It’s as if the duo have traded volcanic heat for metallic tension, replacing sweat with static.

By the time the closer “Brick Head” stretches its seven minutes into a slow, hypnotic sprawl, the album feels less like a collection of songs and more like an exorcism recorded in real time. The chaos has structure, the noise has grace. You could call it grunge, noise rock, punk - but those words don’t quite hold. This is music that claws at its own labels, then dances on the scraps.

"Porcelain" is an album about endurance - not the kind that polishes and preserves, but the kind that chips and scars and still shines through. Fragility, as Pamplemousse remind us, is just another word for being alive loud enough to break.