French-American duo Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack sat down and wrote Monkey Mind in a matter of weeks as a way of processing their anxiety over the devastating wildfires of January 2025 and Trump’s second inauguration, and the result is one of the most joyous and colourful records you’ll hear all year. Monkey Mind follows the span of a day from Sound Asleep and Wide Awake to Lights Out and Sound Asleep (Reprise), through twelve tracks of exotic space age pop, Brazilian bossa nova and sunny seventies rock.

The lyrics are about an overwhelming and draining world, but the music sounds like the most joyful morning of your life. Sound Asleep opens the record with thirty seconds of lone piano moving with such melodic intelligence that it feels like the opening of a musical, with really high level compositional technique disguised as a brief introduction. Wide Awake then takes the same chord sequence and turns it into a fully orchestrated psychedelic pop song with unmistakably French DNA, cheeky but sophisticated. The energy throughout is a lively technicolour even as Mandarin Moon slows the tempo. Solar Return is led by piano and xylophone with gorgeous horn arrangements, and A Pocket Symphony has a merry-go-round melody that whirls with such familiarity that you think you must have heard it before, sounding like a standard that’s existed since the sixties. Doom Mood sounds like elevator music from an extremely funny film with an organ solo at the end that somehow captures a combination of surface stuffiness and barely suppressed hilarity. Tracy Hills is so simple it could be a Paul McCartney classic, and Shinkansen is led by beautiful flutes and wonderful to dance to. Monkey Mind is a very technically accomplished record with high level composition, hiding behind sunshine and charm that’s guaranteed to make you happier.