A self-confessed contrarian, the Canadian artist Marie Davidson sees the duality in most things. That’s why she’s unretired from club music and returned to the fray with her caustic new album, ‘City of Clowns’. On the one hand, it’s a brave, questioning diatribe of surveillance capitalism and society’s increasing descent into dystopian automation. But it’s also a whole lot of fun and an invitation to cut loose on the dancefloor. The title is also instructive, as she tells Anna Cafolla: “As a clown, you can fearlessly question the status quo. There’s a power to being silly that I love…”

A familiar cackle rips through the thick fug of air in the loft gig space of Hackney’s Oslo, chased by a belly-deep percussive cavalcade and an ominous, stalking bassline. ‘I know what I do and I do it well…’ sings Marie Davidson, scavenging the depths of her alto voice. The crowd - already pretty sweaty for a February night in London - yells back.

“On a scale of one-to-ten, who feels like having children right now?” she bellows into the mic, “and who feels like having a good time?”

It’s a riotous welcome back for the transgressive Montreal producer and musician that this crowd – and all the rest – have missed for the last four-and-a-bit years. In 2019, Davidson announced that she was stepping off the dancefloor and retiring from live club music. She was four albums in and lauded for her dexterous live performances, withering lyrical lens and deft hand with hardware. Her juggernaut third solo release, 2016’s ‘Adieux au dancefloor’, was a poetic, pulsating electronic epic that explored the dual romantic pull and repulse she felt for club culture. 

The Polaris Prize-nominated ‘Working Class Woman’ (2018) was a tight concept triumph, with caustic spoken word and blunt synthy arcs that interpolated feminist theory, the stresses of the dance music world and her ability to laugh at herself. Now, Davidson returns with her formula for electronic music – a skewering point of view, her commanding vocals, an ever-curious abundance of sounds from Italo to Chicago house, French Touch and hammering techno – and expands into fresh sonic blends and considering new territories of thought. 

The narrative arcs of ‘Working Class Woman’ and the subversive, sinister pop pressure points of 2020’s ‘Renegade Breakdown’ (in the band she created with Pierre Guerineau and Asaël Robitaille), which swung from Kraftwerk to Chet Baker, are interwoven into ‘City of Clowns’, her sixth studio album. It’s an ambitious record that takes in the expanse of an accomplished artist’s touchstones and exacts something new.

“I love to contradict myself,” Davidson says of coming back to the club with a wicked grin, nursing a cup of black coffee in a corner of the cafe attached to her London hotel. It’s a day before the city’s show and the day after a gig at the hulking, industrial, heavy sound systemed RSO Berlin. She’s been enjoying playing out again with her new tracks, weaving in some of her most storied bangers for a fluid and fun set that sees her behind the decks and stalking stylishly through the crowd.

The propulsive track ‘Fun Times’ in particular appears to be an ode to getting things done and for purposefully stomping around the city. “That’s exactly what I want for people listening to it,” she says laughing, “to walk.” It’s a rollicking track about choosing whether to have kids or to keep to having fun. The short answer? You’re in for a good time. It’s anchored in delightfully sing-song rhyming, with a pelvis-raising, Jeffrey Sfire-esque beat. ‘Sexy Clown’ is a confident statement of self and intent: ‘If I sound salty, it’s that in the past few years I’ve been way too friendly,’ she orates over layers of ear worming synths.

But there was a time where Davidson didn’t think she’d ever touch her hardware again. She took a break in late 2021 after a UK and European tour with her band L’Oeil Nu. “I had a dip in energy... and my will to stay in the music industry,” she says. She went back to Montreal and applied to schools and considered a career in naturopathy – inflected by some of her own health struggles and search for answers and respite. Despite what had been quite a definitive announcement of her music industry exit, music remained an ambient presence. 

“It’s all I’ve ever known – I don’t have a degree. I dropped out of school to do this. I had the urge to just explore myself in other ways. I could make a bit of music for myself, but without the scene suffocating me.” No social media, and no album in mind – yet.

Then she began composing music for the dance company Animals of Distinction. She hadn’t been near a machine in two years. The following year, she took up a random offer for a DJ gig. “My booker rejected the offer of a live show first and the promoters said they would take anything – even a DJ set. I’d not DJed properly before – I couldn’t mix! So, this felt like a nice challenge. I rented CDJs and realised I really, really like it.” 

The CDJs felt like a playground – a tactile screen, various cue points and fun functions that reminded her of the hardware she did know well. After a few months of DJing, it made the idea of playing live appealing once again.

An album, though, was still totally uncertain. It was only when she spent one long summer reading ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff that ideas began to form. The 2019 book proposes the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’ as what we’re all living through today; where users’ online information, our likes and dislikes, are used to predict and shape our behaviours for corporate profit. A system that erodes personal autonomy and demolishes the very foundations of democracy. Davidson was enraptured and enraged by it.

“I saw such a strong direction,” she says. “It was so important for me and I wanted more people to be aware of it. I felt scared and frustrated. I was naive: what the fuck was big tech? What were they doing with our data? Why is nothing private? And it’s reshaping our world! I did what I could only think to do.” 

A recent skirmish at a Ryanair check-in desk over her digital artist’s visa to even get into the UK for her London show was just another incident that added to the frustrations she’s felt over data and privacy. “Even just to come here and do what I do… as artists, we’re handing over so much. And who is it benefitting? We’re living in an automated society; we’re losing our humanity and we’re all totally apathetic about it. This kind of thinking has really driven the record.”

Davidson has long dealt in dualities and says there are two sides to this latest album. First: an exploration of big tech, its influence over us all and the numbness it has imposed upon us. Second? “We’re all getting screwed! We have to find the fun times and the sexy clown in all of us.”

She adds: “I knew that I was stepping in a very heavy, loaded territory, we needed some lightness. I didn’t want this record to fall into the cracks – its message is too important to me. So, you need playfulness.”

‘Fun Times’ was the third track that she wrote. It was, Davidson says, a “for real attempt at a pop club track”. She recalls the clubby sensibilities and danceability of ‘Working Class Woman’ and the poppier structures of ‘Renegade Breakdown’ with her band L’Oeil Nu. “Choruses and verses, let’s do it!” she says. “But I’ve never had the skills or the interests to do ‘pop, pop’. I wanted to lean more towards beats and baselines, with a pop vibe.”

This was the first demo she showed Pierre Guerineau – her sound engineer, co-producer and husband. “We define ourselves as husband and wife in life, but not in music,” she says astutely. “We were bandmates (as the duo Essaie Pas) before anything. I call him my partner with music – ‘husband and wife’ is too dismissive to describe what is a real creative partnership. We’ve been making music for almost 15 years.” She asked him to co-produce on ‘Fun Times’, and the collaborative spirit of their last musical lives emerged once again and they decided to co-produce the whole album together. 

When Davidson picked up production again it was with her original hardware, but when she began collaborating with Guerineau, they put everything on Ableton. “But I am so bad at Ableton,” she says emphatically. “I had only used it for remixing. I want to better my skills because I have so many ideas.” Davidson bought an Elektron Syntakt that she still uses. “I try to be more efficient now.” 

‘Fun Times’, she believes, is the most sonically ambitious on the album – the rest are straight to the point. But all the while, her voice has remained her most important instrument. “I don’t consider myself a great singer, but I have a voice that is founded in years of research,” she says. Davidson references Miles Davis, whose biography deeply inspired her: “I cannot compare myself to him, on no level at all, but I love his approach to music. He talks about working on his tone in the same way guitarists do. I love that musicianship mindset and so I really worked on my tone: how I speak, sing, sing-song.” ‘Validations Weight’ has her voice morph into Amazon’s voice-on-demand service Polly.

David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax and their label imprint DEEWEE came into the mix a year later. “Four producers... was an interesting process,” she says with a quick laugh. “It was long, but very rewarding.” To release music on DEEWEE, the record has to at least all be mixed at their studio in Ghent, Belgium. Davidson and Guerineau came armed with most of the album. The button twisting, darkly melodic ‘Push Me Fuckhead’ was the only track done totally from scratch. Soulwax added dynamic new layers to the release. “I had a total blast doing it,” Davidson says. 

‘Sexy Clown’ was the penultimately made track, just as Davidson had returned from a small Asia tour in 2023, where she was “fucked from the cycle”. The process unlocked something in her mind, and she wrote the track in two days. “I kept having these little lines and jokes coming to me. It was an internal dialogue taking the piss out of myself and the entertainment industry – I felt like a comedian!” 

‘I’m ever so sorry, I don’t think I fit,’ she sings slyly. It sounds like stand-up. “I love that,” she says.

It was an opportunity for Davidson to both have some fun and go off at an industry she had once, indefinitely, turned her back on: with its influencers and the pressure to be extremely ‘on’ social media to push your ‘brand’ rather than cultivate true artistry; its fake personalities; the feminism that she expounded on ‘Working Class Woman’ that had become commodified and the incoherent line-ups she found herself on where the only thing she had in common with the other artists was gender. 

“I never took the industry or all its scenes seriously, but it was liberating to write this,” she says. While ‘Y.A.A.M.’ leans into this as a punky, hard-edged techno steam-release, ‘Sexy Clown’ introduces the record’s key figure – the clown, someone who always gets underestimated but knows exactly who they are. ‘You like it when I’m mean? You find it sexy?’ she talk-sings, both sensual and menacing. ‘Don’t get it confused, because I do it for me.’

“I never wanted to be a ‘queen’ or a ‘girl boss’ or a ‘bad bitch’,” she says, batting the air with each corrosively femme moniker. “I’m happy to be a clown. I think of the joker card and how it can change the whole course of a card game. As a clown, you can fearlessly question the status quo. There’s a power to being silly that I love.”

Humour has always been at the crux of Davidson’s work, with her withering lyrics and sonic twists and turns. She found her love for comedy shows and sketches in the pandemic – watching performances by George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle and Wanda Sykes. “Wanda has this line: ‘I’m an entertainer!’ I wrote that line in ‘Sexy Clown’ before I even saw her do it,” she says. “I love to squirm with comedy – I want people to squirm with me too. This shouldn’t feel comfortable.”

If there’s one overarching topic that binds Davidson’s digital rebel and clown characters from this dual-themed album, it’s the tension of self-perception and self-performance: in the online space we have to self-annihilate in, but it’s also the world where we forge our identities. How does Davidson navigate her own sense of self?

“My identity has always been complicated,” she says. “When I’m writing songs, I try to be a voyeur. I try to consider how other people perceive me, my generation.” Davidson shares that she’s been through six years of psychoanalysis. “Jungian, not Freudian... I’m not really into Freud,” she says. This therapy became a part of her creative process. She stopped going to analysis around the time the album was completed last spring. The record, then, felt like catharsis. “‘Working Class Woman’ and ‘City of Clowns’ are my most authentic and true responses to living in this world,” she says assuredly.

But it’s in her character play that Davidson most confidently exalts her own themes. “Technology is lusting after our data,” she says. “I wanted to harness that BDSM energy.” 

The hulking ‘Demolition’ is like a sexually charged order for your own destruction, an AI-voiced Domme that you’re happy to have bend your will. 

“You might think you’ve heard this dominatrix voice before on ‘Work It’ (her anthemic 2018 track memorably remixed by Soulwax),” says Davidson, “but I think of that track as more commanding – I am a life coach! This is a new persona for me. On ‘Demolition’, you must submit... to the terms and conditions. I am the voice of the endless pop-ups and algorithmic searches.” 

She leans back and folds her arms in a playfully goading manner. “Are we going to get into artificial intelligence?” she asks.

Let’s see how far we can take it.

“Well, I have never thought of AI as being inherently bad,” she says. “I think it was a wonderful invention and it’s inevitably going to keep changing everything. What I’m worried about is how people use it and who trains it. People like Elon Musk, the tech bros... if they could all die maybe we would have a chance to evolve the world into something nice. But no, it’s all used for genocide and security, rather than fighting climate change and allowing people to make great art.”

Davidson is keen to embrace her own quandaries and contradictions, as an artist and a person that has to engage with technology in order to live, work and make art. More personally, she considers the tension between telling the truth and being truly creative. Is it necessary to have an unwavering view of yourself as an artist? Is change and contradiction, and all the messy nuances of humanity, an obstacle to pure art? The wall-to-wall banger and pure hardware track ‘Contrarian’ takes on that question, bolstered by ravaging techno beats.

“I think it’s really important in an artistic process to allow yourself to change your mind,” she says. “I love that I’m a contrarian. I’m very aware that I’ve publicly gone back on myself as an artist, even on making techno music. I can come back years later to something I’ve said and really laugh! Look, I’m moody! And it’s tough to be an artist where your whole job can be based on being judged.” In an industry that pressures artists into pigeonholing themselves to please algorithms and corporation playlisting, this feels like an important testament.

Yet Davidson has evaded such boxing-in throughout her career. “People have always been uncomfortable with artists being in grey areas,” she says. “Even when I was ‘underground’ – ‘oh, you make techno!’ But that’s not really techno. There’s instruments. You have a guitar. ‘Oh, you’re a cold wave band!’ You bring a synth on stage. ‘You’re synth wave!’ I have always found it unhelpful to think of music this way, it doesn’t offer much space to grow.”

Women particularly have to challenge this – singing on a track? That’s pop. You’re a woman? Maybe we can book you for our sanitary pad-sponsored International Women’s Day line-up. We keep at this for more than the wordcount of this profile will allow. Suffice to say, Davidson has thoughts.

“It’s back to that commodified feminist marketing that I hate,” she says with a sigh and a hiss. “I can listen to a whole playlist of artists who just so happen to be women without thinking about it – they just make good music. ‘Woman’ is not a genre.”

As her perspective has lifted now as both a producer and a fully-fledged DJ, Davidson thinks all the more about her listeners – and the dancers gyrating their bodies in front of her decks. “I really thought about the dancefloor a lot more this time,” she says. “I opened up the structures. Yeah, ‘Work It’ has verses and choruses if you want there to be, but there’s barely a melodic element – to me anyway. I wrote it on a TR-707 only using kick snares and a mic. I added a little synth line on the Arturia MiniBrute and then a bassline to the chorus in the studio version. Soulwax added just one melodic line that’s what made that remix a hit.” By contrast, the tracks on ‘City of Clowns’ are first and foremost what she wants to DJ herself and see people move to – and be moved by.

Now, with a new arsenal of music that asks the big questions of our time to even bigger, bolshier beats, getting the opportunity to speak so directly to her audience again with real life shows is what keeps her propelling forward. 

“It really gives me so much hope and energy to connect with people in real life at shows,” she says. “It validates the energy I’ve always put into this and it makes coming back feel so good. Positive feedback online comes and goes, but there’s nothing like people sweating and putting their whole balls into it, right in front of you.” The next few months sees her picking up at festivals and serious sound system-housing venues around Europe. 

When Davidson takes to the stage the next evening, the glow of her gear lights up her face, sinisterly celestial. ‘I Dedicate My Life’ gets hands in the air and a back-and-forth chant going. ‘Sexy Clowns’ immediately enchants the crowd, now deep in the set and in the palm of Davidson’s hands, sliding things nimbly into ‘Work It’  - the juddering Soulwax mix that feels as fresh and dynamic today as it did on first release. 

“2025 is your year, our year,” she shouts. “2025 is the year of the clown!” 

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This article originally appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.