Stromae sings to loneliness in the middle of a news program: this is how he has presented the advance of his new album in nine years

"In your songs you talk a lot about loneliness, does music help you to free yourself from it?" Asks Anne-Claire Coudray, host of the French news program TF1, the most watched in Europe, in a live interview on January 9 to Stromae, a Belgian singer who rose to fame in 2009 with

. After a couple of seconds of silence, and along with some piano chords that begin to sound, the artist begins to sing without stopping looking at the camera and without losing his sober tone. Interview: “I am not the only one who feels alone, and that's already something. And if I counted everyone who feels like me, there would be many ”. For almost two and a half minutes, Stromae continues singing what he would later make known is

(Hell), the second advance of his new album,

which will be released on March 4.

“I have considered suicide several times and I am not proud of it.

Sometimes you feel that it would be the only way to silence them, those thoughts that make me go through hell ", sings the Belgian in his new song.

In 2016, he decided to retire from music due to mental health issues.

From a Belgian mother and a Rwandan father, Paul Van Haver, artistically Stromae - a name that comes from the French slang of the street, to mess up the word teacher - who is now 36 years old, has not had an easy childhood.

The artist has always been characterized by accompanying his songs, presumably happy in the melody, with more pessimistic themes, which he himself described as a “suicidal dance”. The first of his successes,

, combined a few bars of

music that invited people to dance - as the title itself says - with a critique of the current life and work model, which leads to nightlife and discos as a way escape from trouble. In another of his

,

(2013)

Stromae wonders in an almost autobiographical way where his missing father is, who, when he was nine years old, left for Rwanda to fix some work problems: it coincided with the Rwandan genocide and after months they were called to tell them that he had been murdered.

On this subject, the French magazine

dedicated a cover to him in 2016, lampooning his situation, after the attack in Brussels that left 32 fatalities and more than 300 injured.

Cover of the French magazine 'Charlie Hebdo' dedicated to Stromae.Charlie Hebdo

In his new album, Stromae will explore the rhythms and sounds of the five continents, a consequence of the trips he has made around the world accompanying his mother. He already presented his first advance in October,

where he approaches Latin America in terms of music to sing a Belgian cumbia. It is still unknown how many songs the new album will have, but the artist, as he tells in the TF1 interview, will use instruments from almost all parts of the planet, from a Chinese stringed instrument called an

to a typical Baroque harpsichord. The intention is not to have an inspired theme in each place, but to combine the global sounds in all of them. Stromae also used television to interpret

and he did so in the

Jimmy Fallon's