There’s a kind of quiet that doesn’t seek peace, it remembers. It hovers like dust in late light, carrying traces of lives once lived and voices half-forgotten. People Just Float, the new EP from French trio Steel & Velvet, exists precisely in that suspended space. Each of its six songs, reinterpretations of works by Robbie Basho, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Pixies, Nirvana, and Peter Ivers feels less performed than unearthed, like echoes rising slowly from the ground.
Conceived alongside a short film by Loïc Moyou, the record tells the story of Joshua, a solitary man whose silence is broken by a chance encounter in the woods. Yet People Just Float is not content to merely narrate; it listens. The music unfolds as a series of breaths: intimate, fragile, and deliberate; inviting the listener to inhabit the stillness between notes.
The opening, “Orphan’s Lament,” trades Basho’s celestial piano for Romuald Ballet-Baz’s weightless guitar, which flickers like candlelight on wooden walls. Johann Le Roux’s voice emerges slow and human, marked by the kind of ache that doesn’t announce itself. It’s a song about endurance, sung by someone who has already learned to live beside absence.
Their take on “Ring of Fire” strips away the swagger, revealing a confession whispered through smoke rather than shouted across it. With each restrained phrase, love feels less like flame and more like ember; something that burns quietly, unseen, yet refuses to die out.
“Man in the Long Black Coat” turns Dylan’s tale into a spectral meditation on temptation and faith. The song moves like a slow procession through fog; the guitars shimmer and fade, carrying the weight of things unsolved. Then, “Silver” drifts in as a gentle reprieve, sung with haunting delicacy by Le Roux’s daughter, Jade. Her presence transforms the piece into something ancestral, a small bridge between generations where tenderness takes form in tone.
By the time “Lake of Fire” arrives, the EP has grown darker, almost funereal. The grunge is gone; in its place, quiet resignation. Le Roux sings as if facing the inevitability of silence itself, and when “In Heaven” closes the record, Jade’s voice rises like morning light through mist: fragile, luminous, and impossibly calm.
Throughout People Just Float, Steel & Velvet remain loyal to the purity of their ethos: voice, guitar, breath, and space. There’s no ornamentation, no urgency to impress. Each track trusts simplicity to do the heavy lifting, and it does. The spaces between sounds feel alive: charged with memory, humility, and a quiet reverence for what music can reveal when it stops trying to explain.
It’s this restraint that makes the EP so affecting. These aren’t mere covers; they’re contemplations, acts of listening as much as of playing. In revisiting familiar songs, Steel & Velvet find the pulse that endures beneath them: a shared humanity, weary yet awake.
People Just Float doesn’t aim to astonish. It lingers. It reminds. It lives under the breath of memory, where stories become sound and silence becomes the only language left worth speaking..
