Singer Irma back in the light

An air of déjà vu. It all started a few years before with guitar-voice covers on YouTube for the native of Douala, Cameroon, who came to Paris to prepare for business school competitions. Then overnight, in 2011, success. After a burnout due to “marathon tours” in her early days, Irma is making her comeback, accompanied by her guitar and, once again, a short sequence that has gone viral on Instagram, an echo of her emergence on YouTube 15 years ago. years.

In 2024, before Valentine's Day, the Franco Cameroonian sings a breakup song, House of Cards, in the streets of the French capital, with a guitar, her voice and her twin sister, a doctor of chemistry, behind the camera. In just a few days, the short sequences have accumulated more than 15 million views on Instagram.

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With a like from a particular fan, Nick Mulvey, British folk singer. “He subscribes to me, it’s crazy! I had his music in my ears when I walked in New York, where I lived in 2013-2015, Irma tells AFP. I write him a message, he tells me that he discovered my work, likes it and asks me if I would like to accompany him on his European tour.

So here the singer is soon to be back on the road, to provide the opening act, before her own series of concerts and a fifth album in the pipeline for September. The genesis of House of Cards is “very spread out over time, as the artist describes it. This song was born in 2016. It’s what I call a “drawer song”: I always loved it but didn’t know what to do with it until then.”

This “House of Cards” which is collapsing is that of a relationship which is breaking up. “On reflection, I have often been inspired by breakups. “Letter to the Lord” was already that, she laughs. The melody didn't change, I just had trouble finding the tuning [of his guitar], strange at the time, I must have been really bad. Psychoanalysis would love the subtext of agreements/disagreements. This title finds its place in the approach of the thirty-year-old who, for “4-5 months”, has been trying to “recreate something stronger with the people” who follow her on the networks, to “involve them in the creation, with sounds that are not necessarily finished.

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The positive feedback boosted his confidence. “It fixes something: at times, I needed, on stage, machines, computers, almost throwing flames or playing 6,000 instruments, to tell me that I was not illegitimate, not to to say that I would have stolen my place. While his initial success was built on his soulful voice, his folk arrangements and his pop overtures.

Success for which she paid the price after marathon tours in the mid-2010s, with burnout. Now, the artist is armed for what might come. “I'm in a place where I'm more aware, I look at things with more perspective, I take the positive and, for the negative, I know the “process” to no longer have a body that no longer functions all the time. a sudden, she admits. There, I’m going to enjoy it even more, I have peace of mind about that.”