Most of these songs have been sitting on Bandcamp one at a time since 2020. Music for the basses, the first Xavier Monax album to reach streaming services, brings twelve of them together and runs 42 minutes. The French solo project, which works under the lower-case name monax, describes the record as melancholic material in an indie rock and post-punk style. It went up on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer on 30 August 2026; the artist gives 18 September as the date it lands on all platforms.

The title is of course a wink to Depeche Mode’s “Music For The Masses”.

The running order is “The Call”, “Is it the stars”, “White rooms”, “14 off”, “Don’t shoot the pianist”, “Leaving the darkness”, “Quiet again”, “Ordinary Fields”, “Follow me”, “Back in town”, “The sound from my mind” and “From here”. Every track had already appeared as a standalone Bandcamp release between November 2020 and April 2026, so the album works as a first collected edition rather than a set of new recordings. It is self-released, with no label and no distributor beyond digital delivery.

About Xavier Monax

Xavier Monax is a solo project from France. The Bandcamp page gives the country and nothing more precise; there is no city, no biography text and no listed website or social account. Releases are billed as Xavier Monax on streaming services and credited to monax in the liner text.

The Bandcamp catalogue is the fuller picture: around 37 items, mixing short albums with a long run of individual tracks. The earliest, “tout est à vendre”, carries a 2003 date. “The John Room Innocence” followed in September 2020 and the single “Music for the Basses” – one track, “Don’t shoot the pianist” – in November 2020. The nine-track “Viral Kiss” arrived in June 2022, “DREAMS 23” in April 2023 and the two-track “Sur le sable” in April 2025. Between those, singles appeared at a steady rate: “The Sound Of My Mind” in October 2022, “14 off” in February 2023, then “Back in town”, “Ordinary Fields”, “Refuges”, “Simon”, “White rooms”, “Follow me” and “Leaving the darkness” across 2024, “From Here” and “Quiet Again” in 2025, and “L’ironie du sort” and “Is it the stars” in 2026. Cover versions of Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and of Tristana sit alongside them.

The project tags its own work as alternative, alternative rock and wave, and has no recorded label history, no announced live dates and no press coverage in any language before now. “Music for the basses” is the first Xavier Monax release to appear outside Bandcamp.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

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