The rumors were therefore true! Stromae, who retired from the musical circuit at the end of 2015, wracked physically and mentally by two years of crazy tours, announced his return. The interpreter of Then we dance, Papaoutai Where Awesome is announced at Rock en Seine, a festival in the Paris region on the last weekend of August 2022.
Before that, it is the public of his native Belgium who will have the premiere of his return. Stromae will be on the Werchter festival stage on June 19 before that of Les Ardentes, in Liège on July 10, these two institutions of the Belgian musical landscape announced on Friday.
His second album, Square root had shifted the Belgian, 36 years old today, in another dimension. This tube factory had taken him for two years on stages in Europe and the United States. In the USA, he had performed in 2015 at Coachella, the biggest festival in the world and Kanye West had even joined him on stage for Then we dance.
Stromae had also passed through Africa, to Rwanda, the country of origin of his father, who was killed there in 1994 during the genocide. The singer with 3 million albums sold has never made a secret of the big slack that followed.
“It went too fast”
“Even if we sell dreams, it remains a job, and as in any profession, when we work too much, we end up with a burn-out,” he conceded in 2018 in an interview with France 2 Besides a “big physical fatigue”, the megastar also admitted to having suffered from taking a drug, Lariam (an antimalarial, Editor’s note). “I needed time to rebuild myself because it was not great fun”.
He emphasized above all that he “needed to remove all the pressure that success brings (…) I had done 200 concerts in two years, which was an insane number. It was a superb experience but (…) it went too quickly ”.
After this XXL tour, he had initially disappeared from the news, before reappearing in droplets by diversifying his activities alongside his stylist wife Coralie Barbier and his brother Luc Junior Tam, his partners in the Mosaert collective. This 2018 television interview thus took place in the Parisian parade of his ready-to-wear label.
Creativity ? “She is still there”, he reassured his fans already three years ago. The scene ? “I recognize that this is something that I cannot do without. On the other hand, the way I will envision the rest (…) it will be at a much healthier and more rested pace, ”he insisted.