Chest. on acknowledging their privilege and the impulsive nature of their songwriting
Written By: Bella Berry
Chest. are the noise rock band that you keep hearing about. compared to most bands that have been going for around the same time as them, chest. have had things relatively easy. Well connected in the Paris underground music scene, Nico, Elliot, Thibaut, Pierre Louis, and Alexis all work at the notorious Supersonic club in Bastille. What started as a hindrance to their rehearsal hours ended up being the means by which they all met and created the band’s final form. not to mention the connections they were able to make through working at the club, which is known for having bands from all around the world at different levels of popularity. Keeping many general rock and post punk, as well as shoegaze elements in their music, Chest. is always finding ways to bring a new sound to the table, as most members of the band are sound engineers at the club. Additionally, their lead singer, Elliot, provides their rant-y UK punk inspired vocals.
The band is quite new, doing their first ever show as a full fledged band in April 2024. Chest. started moving much faster than they had originally expected, going international for their second and third ever show together in Ireland.
“I think we kind of started it with the idea to have a bit of fun and maybe play a gig or two. We were very lucky in the sense that it kind of found its audience quite quickly. Which basically meant that we had to start taking it more seriously instead of doing things really instinctively without thinking them through,”
Elliot revealed. Wanting to take advantage of the momentum they were rapidly gaining, the band wrote a set of eight songs in about two and a half months. When asked where the band believes they are improving, Elliot admitted that they're “able to take a little bit more of a step back sometimes and think things through. But it’s still got to be fun for us or what’s the point.”
Working at a music venue like Supersonic has undoubtedly had a huge impact on the band.
“We see live music every day. I think it has an influence on how you hear music and how you interpret a live situation. So outside of just the simple things of seeing the mistakes and trying not to make them yourself, it just hypes you up all the time and makes you want to do it even more. I think it’s really beneficial in that way. And also it means that we’ve been able to meet people from all walks of life and different kinds of musicians… some of them have become really good friends and some of them have been able to help us out with gigs, so basically it’s just all beneficial.”
Elliot said.
While it's hard for the members of the band to point to music or artists that directly inspire them, their parisian life seems to be the main thing that inspires the writing of their songs. Nico, the band’s guitarist, revealed that for their recent single, Blood On Your Doorstep, the band
“wanted to talk about our privileges as parisian guys with good flats and such… We just try to evaluate the world around us in contradiction with our own, which has a lot of privileges.”
Impulsivity is also a huge part of what makes the music of Chest. so popular. “We don't really calculate ahead what kind of songs we want to write or what kind of strategy we want to use, it's all very impulsive and organic. I think that’s something really important in a band because you can hear it in songs when things aren’t sincere. That's what I would hope sets us apart from a lot of french bands at least. In France there's this whole thing of very quickly trying to find out what your strategy is in relation to the music. It being how you dress or how you present your sound or the song choices you make. I think the strength that we have is that we don’t do that at all. I think that means that things sound more sincere,” Elliot explained.
Something else that Chest. believes sets them apart from other bands is “we’re all friends with a good singer. (laughs) No for real. Except maybe Free Zorba (The Hooligan), a lot of French bands sound French. I think it's a really big problem if you want to go bigger. You can be really big in France, even if you sound French, but you won’t really be able to grow abroad and be successful. I think it’s one of our main strengths.” Nico said. Expanding on the idea of being such close friends, Elliot agreed that their friendship as a band is what keeps them together as well as what can set them apart from some other bands.
“ it is cliche to say that, but I think (being close friends) is one of the most important parts of being in a band. It’s not easy a lot of the time. Be it the whole creation process which can sometimes be fucking horrible, hard tour conditions sometimes, shit shows, nasty people, whatever. If you don’t have a really solid friendship with the people around you when all that’s going down, it’s not gonna last. So I think that’s the main thing for us because we can get through most things because we like each other so much.”
As for what direction the band wants to move in, there’s one song that hints at the kind of music they want to make moving forward. “I think the song Aceta is the one that is most representative of what we want to do next. It was one of the last songs that we wrote and it mixes together the more dance-y elements that we wanted in our music from the start.” Elliot explained. They also admitted to wanting to go into a more electronic direction, incorporating more synth into their songs.
Chest is hopeful about their future, considering how fast they’ve been able to move in just a year and a half. “ Our first dream, at least for me, was to open for DITZ , so we did it. We talked about it with Pierre-Louis the other day. The next big dream, which is really bigger, would be to open for our idols Fontaines (D.C). But in five years we can wish to play the main stage.” Niko said. The band wants to continue to grow their audience.
“We’d just like to play bigger stages. The whole idea of it is that we’re not one of those bands where we want to keep things as small as possible. Personally I've never been a fan of that sort of thing, where the music is only for a select few… I think the whole point of making music, really, is to make people feel something. Even if it’s ‘why are these fucking twats making this horrible noise?’”
Elliot said.
Chest. are a band that are very much a part of the Paris underground scene’s heart. While they have international appeal and dreams of growing bigger, they still stay close to their roots and keep things alive in the scene that they started in. Playing Rock En Seine, one of Paris’s biggest music festivals this August, Chest. are steadily rising up. Their newest single releases on Sep 5, 2025, so keep an eye out for where their sound is headed.