Oi! la la: meet the new wave of French punks making noise

The Guardian

5 days ago

Wearing washed 501 jeans, buzzcuts, boots and braces, punks and skinheads are packed into a small and sweaty venue. They're pogoing to power chords and shouting along to the terrace-style chants coming from the stage.
But this isn't London's 100 Club in 1978, it's a gig by French band Syndrome 81 in the suburbs of Paris in 2025. They sound like a surprising but appealing mash-up of Cockney Rejects and the Cult. And they are part of a new wave of French Oi! punk bands who are blending scrappy, working-class angst with a firm nod to the country's synth-soaked coldwave past.
In the UK in the 1970s, Oi! erupted as a wave of rowdy street punk with solidly working-class roots, attracting a new set of skinhead fans with its simple but upbeat sounds, pairing power-chord riffing with anthemic vocals.
Yet from Bordeaux to Brest, from Lyon and Lille to Paris, countless new additions to France's punk scene are breathing post-punk and new wave influences into the genre. There are Rancoeur, with sparse post-punk, punchy basslines upfront in the mix, and there are Oi Boys, and Rixe, with their drum-machine-driven rhythms. Bands such as Chiaroscuro fuse typical Oi! snarls with darker melodies, while Utopie opt for frosty lo-fi riffing and uptempo synth-punks No Filter throw quasi-industrial keyboard twinkling into the mix.
These bands gleefully experiment with Oi!'s common motifs, layering back-and-forth gang vocals over catchy synth hooks – variously construed as a whole new genre: French Oi, or sometimes Cold Oi, though the bands themselves often balk at such labels.
And unlike the British scene that influenced them, these French bands are uniformly antifascist. Some, like Rancoeur, have vocally distanced themselves from the genre's historic far-right associations, after realising that some of their followers on social media were racist.
These post-punk currents kicked off across France in earnest about a decade ago, with groups including Zone Infinie, Traitre, Douche Froide, Litovsk and Hinin. Since then, this new wave of French Oi! bands have gained a zeitgeisty following in the international punk underground. Although the approaches of these bands differ, they tend to share some common notes: heavy on the atmosphere and with a broadly minimalist output, played with melancholic feeling and a lower tempo.
The slowed-down sound of Syndrome 81, whose 2022 LP Prisons Imaginaires was met with acclaim, was 'an accident, to be honest', admits vocalist Fabrice Le Roux. The usual drummer for the group was unable to attend rehearsals, forcing the band to write slower songs that they could actually play.
Other bands have leaned heavily into electronic influences. Matthieu Pellerin of Oi Boys picked a Yamaha rhythm box to bring a 'cold and martial aesthetic' into their music. Rancoeur, meanwhile, started life as classic Oi! in the vein of Welsh band the Oppressed. But during Covid, says bassist and singer Julien Viala, the whole group started listening to post-punk and coldwave. When they could finally rehearse after lockdowns lifted, they all 'arrived with new effects on our guitars', and that's when they named their sound 'Cold Oi', possibly coining the phrase.
Crucially, these bands sing en français – something Syndrome 81's Le Roux was sceptical about at first. 'I thought singing in French could be sketchy,' he says. 'Some bands are very good but when you listen to the lyrics, it sounds dumb and shitty. I never thought it would speak to people abroad.'
But speak to people abroad it has. Multiple comments on widely streamed YouTube playlists and in online punk communities proclaim the superiority of French-sung Oi!, while even monolingual gig-goers attending tours in the US do their best to sing along in the language.
While this gloom-tinged Oi! is having a moment in France, its influences run deeper. In the UK, after a fissure in classic Derbyshire Oi! band Blitz, the remaining members steered so abruptly into post-punk and new wave that they shed many of their fans in the process. But 'Blitz opened the doors to new influences between Oi! and post-punk', says Julien Viala of Rancoeur. 'Every band tries to do something new. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We're lucky to have a strong French punk history and I think a lot of new bands are inspired by old bands.'
In France, 1980s Oi! bands such as Brest's Komintern Sect and Camera Silens – whose bassist and singer Gilles Bertin notoriously robbed a cash-handling company in Toulouse before going on the lam – are infused with a darker, heavily reverberated edge.
Further back still, France has not only flirted with the punk avant garde but helped to define it, says Andrew Hussey, a historian of French culture and punk. 'There was a lot of crossover between art, literature and rock music,' says Hussey, helping to drive more experimental sounds.
Although influenced by UK bands such as the Clash, the pioneering French punks Métal Urbain plumped for a machine over a human drummer in the mid-1970s. These proto-industrial leanings influenced other French bands such as Bérurier Noir, who, at their most idiosyncratic and weird, create an uncanny kind of punk with mechanical beats.
Le coldwave, meanwhile, with its icy guitars and synth melodies, was born in the late 1970s – a mixture of post-punk and new wave pop exemplified by bands such as Asylum Party and Marquis de Sade. All together, says Hussey, these new French Oi! bands take the real working-class energy of historic French punk and 'graft it on to this European sensibility' with additional coldwave flair.
Pellerin – who has retired Oi Boys but will soon release a new synth-driven Oi! band called Nuits Blanches, with members from Rixe and Headbussa – credits the shared commonalities of France and the UK with birthing these sounds. 'Blitz were making Oi-wave in the early 80s,' he says. 'France and England, with their pasts of struggle, of landscapes deformed by industrialisation, unemployment rates and endless autumns, have musical periods marked by anger.'
That can be found in the UK post-punk of the late 1970s, he says, just as it can in the French emo scene of the early 00s or in this new crop of French Oi! bands. 'With disillusioned voices over minor chords, there's less of a tautological relationship, and a kind of subtlety to the music,' Pellerin says. 'And it makes me happy that internationally, people are interested in France for all this too.'