On April Fools’ Day 2014, Caravan Palace arrived in Boston for their first-ever standalone gig in the United States. From the stage of the Paradise Rock Club, singer Zoé Colotis excitedly told the crowd the good news: “We just arrived today. It’s our first gig in the US. So happy to stand around with you guys. Let’s have some fun together!”
The following night at the Best Buy Theater in New York City, the band broke their tradition of never playing a track live before it’s been formally released and gifted the upbeat banger “Lone Digger” to a live audience. In the year that followed, the song and the album that it would later come from would effectively change their lives forever.
<|°_°|> (which is often referred to as Robot Face or sometimes just Robot) arrived in the middle of Caravan Palace‘s discography, but quickly took on great importance. The titular “robot” would effectively serve as the group’s branding, their mascot going forward, with each subsequent full-length’s cover art reflecting the retro-mechanical motif in some way. It was very Caravan Palace. In other words, it was perfect.
Initially formed in 2005, Caravan Palace consisted of Charles Delaporte (bass, programming), Hugues Payen (violin, programming), and Arnaud Vial (guitar, programming). Singer Zoé Colotis would join in 2006, while Antoine Toustou (electronics, trombone) and Camille Chapelière (sax/clarinet) showed up in 2007, initially as live support before moving into the songwriting process. Paul-Marie Barbier (keys and vibraphone) would formally join in 2012. The lineup would change over time, and while Chapelière had no songwriting credits on this record, he still toured with the band until 2017.
Caravan Palace were mainly associated with the rising electro swing movement that started in Western countries in the 1990s, wherein the jazz stylings of Django Reinhardt and Lionel Hampton merged with the immediate electro beats of Big Beat acts like Daft Punk and Justice to craft a bridge-building aesthetic that was retro-leaning and contemporary cool all at once.
The Paris-based Caravan Palace were often mentioned alongside the likes of Austria’s Parov Stelar and Ireland’s Kormac, groups who blended samples and live instrumentation with techno percussion to lead a new musical movement. These acts would have sporadic viral moments, but global ubiquity wasn’t always something on the table, as most outfits in this field rarely found an audience beyond blogosphere notices and early YouTube success stories.
Caravan Palace always found success in their native France, with their eponymous 2008 debut reaching as high as #11 on the album charts, but after the extensive tour for their 2012 sophomore album Panic, the need to change up their sound was immediate to all. Nothing overt, mind you, but just slight tweaks to the already-colorful palette to keep things new and interesting.
“Looking back, is that at the time this album felt like a risky move in terms of our fanbase,” admits Vial when reflecting on the album’s development. “We were moving far away from swing, and we had pretty much erased the gypsy jazz side that defined us in the beginning. There were a lot of debates between the composers.”
Although “Lone Digger” felt like a smash-in-the-making when it had its on-stage premiere in 2014, the development of <|°_°|> took considerable time, right down to the album title. It was still 2014 when Caravan Palace were exchanging texts in the group chat, and Toustou placed a few emojis—”…”—in the middle of a conversation. Manager Olivier Linglet said he saw a robot and replied with <“…”>. The group soon agreed to the official title, <|°_°|>, only after receiving confirmation that streaming services would allow these characters to serve as the proper formal title.
While tour bus difficulties marred the group’s 2014 US tour (documented extensively on their YouTube channel), Caravan Palace prevailed and took a year off the road once it was finished to work on the record. In June of 2015, “Comics” was released as the teaser single—a thumping, surprising concoction of rising synth lines and warped instrumental passages. Delaporte and Vial often cite it as their favorite track. The original idea was to take the stop-time technique used in 1950s R&B songs and translate it into a more rapping cadence. According to Vial, the song was initially written in the minor key, but was later upgraded to a major key, with no minor notes remaining.
Elements of its eerie original intention remain, most notably during that chorus-breaking line of “Murder!” That line became the centerpiece of a 2019 TikTok video by tinkerprincess0, in which she displayed live-action anime expressions that matched the song’s tone. It gave the song new life and prominence, as many of <|°_°|>‘s tracks would do over time.
The jumpy, bouncy “Mighty” opens with a retro-sounding track trying to define what a “jumping mood” is, as the listener will very shortly get into one. Originally conceived as a more acoustic number with a Les Paul-inspired riff, the song went through multiple iterations before Caravan Palace realized it would work better as a club track. JFTH, an artist who leans toward house/club music, was brought in, using the Lately Bass sound from the Yamaha TX81Z synthesizer to give the song real punch. An extended version of the song would eventually be released as a single in 2016.
When your humble author saw Caravan Palace play the House of Blues in Chicago in 2016, “Comics” opened the show to great aplomb. The audience were lively, energetic, and instantly engaged. While the years since have seen multiple staples carry on through their in-person performances (you can always count on “Brotherswing”!), it’s no surprise that the songs from <|°_°|> continue to make up a healthy amount of their live selections. As of 2025, “Comics” has even been upgraded to “encore opener” in some instances. “Mighty”, meanwhile, is often played second-to-last in the primary set. These tracks continue to pack quite the punch.
Flashing back to 2016, animator Alkifeather published a short video using the song “Aftermath” as the basis for an animation that would soon go viral. The swoony, almost dream-like track relies heavily on stop-start dynamics, with a synth break that stops at regular intervals, allowing either drum fills or chugging guitar loops to fill the gaps. A trend emerged in this era, where vocal samples were added to the track’s many drops and took on increasingly darker forms, which Caravan Palace candidly wasn’t a big fan of.
“Wonderland” would also rank as a “2016 single release”, thanks to its distinct swooning horn stabs, which made quite an impression on listeners. Opening with a sample from “Nutcracker Suite” (“Just imagine a trip to a wonderful land of candy, and jam, and iiiiice cream!”), the playfully spooky number alternates between playful entendres (the chorus of “all up in the gut” is revealed to be an abbreviation of “all up in the gutter”), braggadocios power (“I gotta hit that street, you better watch it / With a gat that I cock with a full clip”), and a final twist where this is all imagined (“I’m just a random girl with gentle manners / In my dreams I rock and I rule the wonderland”).
The video, a sly and gorgeously rendered animated tale of a woman coming into her power in various forms, would over time rack up 90 million views (as of 2025) and become another visual touchstone from this heralded era. Much as with the “Lone Digger” video (which we’ll get to in a minute), so much went into its creation. Again, using studio Double Ninja with production by Cumulus, Vial explained their appeal: “Often their scripts are just three lines long. They’re not the kings of storyboarding, but they go for the jugular with scripts that impact and are on the controversial side. And their character design is something else!”
Delaporte goes one step further in talking about the studio: “There is something in their aesthetic that really resonates with Caravan Palace: That playful, offbeat mix of styles and influences. Even if our contexts are different, we share that same taste for blending worlds that don’t usually meet.”
In seeing the final product, Colotis was particularly impressed: “I immediately appreciated its ‘full color/colorful’ aspect (for the energy it conveys) and the aesthetic references that coexist: rap bling and boom-boom shorts vs. Greek columns and an ‘Art Nouveau’ bandstand, against a backdrop of ‘Sims’ scenery and a big Hummer … it immediately looked like a fun and wacky thing, just the way we like them. Being also sensitive to what is ‘graphic,’ I liked the attention paid to the proportions in each shot, the presence of a certain symmetry in the image, and the ‘kaleidoscope’ effects that instantly evoked the Bubsy Berkey films from the 1930s, which I particularly like (the final image is a good example).
“It seemed to me that the evocation of the dream and its cathartic function did justice to our purpose: ‘I know all these things never happen, I’m just a random girl with gentle manners,’” she concludes. Then, as an aside: “For the record, I remember that it was me who asked Arnaud to add this final verse to avoid falling into the first degree ‘violent rap’ which didn’t really resemble us.”
Back on the album, the boppy “Tattoos”, which meshes samples and lively instrumentation for a piano boogie-woogie vibe where a scratchy vocal sample says “I got plenty of tattoos” over and over again, hews as close to the “classic” Caravan Palace sound of the debut more than any track here. Toustou, a dancer who has proven time and time again that he’s unafraid to bring his boogie out onto a concert stage, truly pushed for the track to deliver true lindy hop energy.
Kicking off the album’s proper back half is “Midnight”, a number that starts with spooky piano lines and yearning sax work, right before the vocal sample comes in during the drop to ask, “Why is everybody always pickin’ on me?” The song then explodes into a groovy beatscape, which Caravan Palace ride to a funky conclusion. Inspired by Chopin’s nocturnes, it has a different vibe than their previous work, and the inclusion of that sax line ultimately led to the full adoption of the baritone sax in their live sets.
The plunky, dreamy, downright glittery “Russian” would soon become another staple, taking clear melodic inspiration from tracks like “Do Your Thing” by UK beatmasters Basement Jaxx. Initially thought of as perhaps even too pop and not swing enough for the group, Caravan Palace plowed through recording, and even a fresh vocal take from Colotis brought the pop elements to the forefront. Payen made it his mission to Carvangalize this track, adding more unique sound plops along with a stride piano part recorded by then-pianist Paul-Marie Barbier. The result was a song that may have started in a different universe but ended firmly within that swing-pop wheelhouse.
Are you Mr. Beau or are you Shorty Jones? So rests the quixotic question at the center of “Wonda”, a synth-funk workout that asks the listener to do “the kinky thing”. Payen was aiming for a piano line not too unlike “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and a mere piano break wasn’t enough. This is a Caravan Palace original we’re talking about, so you know full well that a track like this ends best with a vibraphone-led outro. That plays directly into the more experimental and expressive back-half of <|°_°|>, where there are fewer out-and-out bangers but instead striking moments of fluidity and wonder (or wonda?).
“Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies” unquestionably wins the award for most distinct song title, but the melodic contents are even more intriguing. A loose and limber guitar loop swings in and out of samples, hovering over atmospheric passages and using sampled vocals to ask what’s the use of jivin’. At around 2:48, the song shifts into a looped, ambient phrase that feels almost Jon Hopkins-esque before reuniting with the central melodic theme, creating an experience that’s as empathetic as it is quietly grandiose, like a close friend telling a big secret.
That reverb-soaked bridge was created entirely by Toustou as Caravan Palace recount, and no one is quite sure how he did it. They have even referred to such sonic wizardry as nothing short of legendary.
Payen was the chief architect of the closer “Lay Down”, and the band have often referred to his songwriting practice as akin to a mad scientist tinkering. Using chopped-and-spliced vocals, the song depicts how the narrator can’t get sick and lie down, for they know their soul is bound for hell. Caravan Palace talk about how the production changes significantly during development: most of the original percussive elements were removed. The “Charles choir” of vocals was part of the demo, and while initially intended to be re-recorded, it was considered so perfect as-is that it was left in the outro. Caravan Palace allegedly spent a long time finding the ideal snare sound, too.
The record closes with a smooth swing sample, as the group made it clear to their fans that, despite all the genre experiments and melodic detours, the departing message was simple: “Yes, Caravan is still very much into swing.”
On 16 October 2015, <|°_°|> was unleashed onto the world. It would open at #64 in the UK Albums Chart, #51 in France’s SNEP, and reach #3 on Billboard’s Top Dance Albums chart in the US, where it would remain for 65 weeks. Despite all of these achievements, Caravan Palace admit that the album wasn’t an immediate success — it grew very gradually. Yet even with that, the initial “rejection” was painful.
Specifically, they were surprised to learn that some fans of the first album had almost abandoned Caravan Palace entirely by this point. They honed in on the “gypsy swing” elements of those first records: the crisp guitars, the clarinet work, etc. Vial notes that “When the album came out, the online comments were pretty hard to take. ‘Where’s the gypsy guitar?’ ‘When will you get back to swing?’ — that kind of thing… “In the end, a new audience found us,” he beams. “More international, probably younger too. But it took time. […] Not a passing trend, not driven by media hype — just good, honest word of mouth.”
Per Laurent Masset, owner of the record label Le Plan Recordings, he notes that “After <|°_°|> landed, there was a lot of banter backstage where I’d come up to Caravan Palace and ask if they’d seen this or that, from social media or the internet. We discovered a lot of internet activity that we didn’t suspect. I’d never heard of TikTok, and then ‘Wonderland’ happened right as it was being rebranded from musical.ly, which I’d not heard of either. I spent the weekend looking at the hundreds of thousands of user-generated content uploaded live with the song, some with hundreds of thousands of comments, just mind blown.
“There’s also the dances, the finger-tutting, the animation memes, video game culture with the Hotline Miami references, or the Undertale mash-up, but also this overflowing creativity of people all over the world, who constantly reinterpret everything,” he continues. “Be it bootleg T-shirts in Mexico City, people creating their own Caravan Palace-related clothes to wear at concerts, or the thousands and thousands of DeviantArt posts. That’s a recent development in the relationship between an artist and their fans, and it’s a creativity that is sometimes a source of inspiration for the band.”
Adds Vial: “The Cosplay universe brought to us by the young audience, mainly American, is super fun. It’s true that the range of characters featured in our videos gives our young fans something to look forward to. I love seeing this, and I really hope this keeps growing.”
Yet much of the album’s success—and Caravan Palace’s legacy—can be tied to that stunning, upbeat opener, “Lone Digger”. While the song was released as a single in September of 2015, the music video wouldn’t drop until November, handled by the Double Ninja production house. The animated clip shows a gang of anthropomorphic cats making their way into a strip club where a series of mishaps leads to a shockingly violent ending. To call it memorable would be an understatement.
Band manager Olivier Linglet notes that “The band likes to give full artistic freedom to the directors they work with, which means not all videos are to the band’s taste and they rarely match the original meaning of the song. It’s actually happened another time that an MV would have worked better with the lyrics of another song (‘Plume’ vs. ‘Melancolia’).”
Colotis is blunt in her assessment, noting that when she saw the finished video, she “almost cried out of disappointment, because to me it was supposed to be a story for a comic”.
“Originally, I had written something inspired by a strip club in Los Angeles that I went to with a friend, born and raised in LA, whom I was staying with in Highland Park,” Colotis continues. “He introduced me to classic cars and all sorts of cool things in the city. It was during the three months that Toustou and I had decided to spend in LA to improve our English and soak up the American culture. The strip club in question was Jumbo’s Clown Room (I still have the tape!).
“A great place run by women, where a lot of women go because the pole dance acts are very theatrical and athletic. (They say Courtney Love once worked there.) So there have been dozens of interpretations of that song (I don’t think we included them in the album booklet), but originally, it was about a stripper addressing the crowd…”
Thankfully, the gazelle stripper who ends up being the last survivor of the video was a proxy for everything from pushing through the pain to showing the resilience of women in light of more basic and (intrinsically) animal instincts. While her final shot may show her covered in blood, it’s not her own, and this pop-art violent fantasy would soon resonate with the viewers all around the world, transcending even languages.
In an extremely unfortunate bit of timing, a day after the release of the clever-but-violent video, a terrorist attack at Le Bataclan would make world headlines, and Caravan Palace promptly abandoned promotions for the video out of respect for the hundreds of victims. The music video still reached over a million views by the end of that year.
The group continue onward, covering the song “Black Betty” during a taping of the program Taratata, which would soon become a live staple and later a standalone 2017 single that remained closely tied to the <|°_°|> era. In the years that followed, even with the release of other Caravan Palace albums, <|°_°|> was the gift that kept on giving. They would play on UK television staples hosted by Jonathan Ross and Jools Holland. They’d play St. Petersburg and Moscow. The world opened up to them in a way that it hadn’t for other acts playing within their genre wheelhouse.
“Lone Digger” would eventually crest to over 400 million YouTube views and be certified platinum by the RIAA, becoming a bona fide hit and a generational calling card. They receive accolades for their success, gain a reputation for their riotously fun live shows, and, thanks to “Lone Digger”, inspired an official count of over 10,000 pieces of MV-inspired fan art alone by January 2020.
“I remember one day when my local school called me because my son, who must have been in sixth grade at the time, had gotten into a fight because a kid had told him ‘your dad is a pornographer’ after watching ‘Lone Digger’,” recalls Masset. “It turned into the event of the day at school, with a fight scheduled after class, so there was a crowd, and the police were called. I was a little embarrassed, but secretly quite happy that a Caravan Palace video was reaching out into suburban America.”
The release of 2019’s Chronologic and 2024’s Gangbusters Melody Club was via Caravan Palace’s own sublabel, appropriately named Lone Diggers. “Lone Diggers is our own little lab,” beams Delaporte. “We built it to keep full creative control, from the music itself, the artwork, the visuals, even the timing of releases. […] After years in the industry, we just wanted to run our own ship, release what feels right. It’s freedom, and it sounds like us.”
Thanks to those wise decisions both creatively and economically, the milestones just kept tumbling towards them: Soon, they’d pass over a billion YouTube views, net hundreds of millions of streams, and continue to be one of the most prominent and active acts in the electro-swing movement, up to the point where “electro-swing” increasingly feels like too limiting of a label for what they’ve been able to accomplish.
Looking back on it all, Vial marvels at how “Lone Digger” and <|°_°|> would shape their identities. “It became one of the most popular songs in the genre — and the band’s biggest hit — so that’s kind of reassuring,” he notes. “It’s always worth taking risks.”
“Why deprive yourself of the thrill of ‘unlikely destinations’ and not take the side roads of free creation when you have the opportunity?” Colotis chimes in. “It’s currently a luxury, but I dream of a world where taking risks would be the norm. Where even if it is not always easy, possible or comfortable, we would consider it a ‘duty’ in creative professions and as basic hygiene for any self-respecting artist.”
That first risk was the most important: Caravan Palace breaking their cardinal “no previews” rule and playing “Lone Digger” in front of a New York audience nearly a year before its formal release. April Fools’ Day may have only been the day prior to that first live performance of the classic, but the only fools out there are the ones who doubted such a dynamic outfit would ever make it this big.