Whiz Woodkid

37-year-old French-born, New York-resident video director Yoann Lemoine had filmed acclaimed clips for artists including Lana Del Rey, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift before leaping the other side of the camera to record the album “The Golden Age” under the pseudonym Woodkid in 2013.

That record, which went to No 2 in France is a singular entity. Lyon resident in his youth, the singer of Polish Jewish origin made beauty, war and mineral his universe. Named at the Grammy Awards for his video talents, this friend of Kris Van Assche and Agyness Deyn released a first album, impressive of musicality. Himself a slight, diminutive figure in a beard and peaked cap, what interested him for his first released album was to work in a mythological way the story of a “child of wood” which becomes harder and turns into stone.

Interviewed by the magazine ELLE, the musician had this to say about his obsession with the sacred and with black and white in his clips: “I wanted this project to be architectural, cold, to lead to fairly dark periods in history. This is also the very romantic theme of the album: a very emotional voice and a huge musical blockhouse around, which it seeks to break. We find the codes of adulthood, martial or religious themes, with organs and modern reworked percussion”.

Since then, the artist whose first EP Iron was featured in trailers for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and the film Hitchcock, as well as the TV series Teen Wolf, has collaborated with other musicians, as well as with French luxury brands (Dior, Vuitton), some of his tracks have been featured in ads and TV shows, he has been performing around the planet, and got a few awards. 

Today Woodkid is finally back after having been secretly working on his second album (released on 24 April 2020) and a brand new live show (European tour, May-November 2020) for the past 5 years.