Like so many of his compatriots, Julien has long sung the secrets of his soul in English, mainly for reasons of convenience. Yet now, after a few years of exile in Australia, especially as antipodean indie-pop institution Tame Impala’s master of toms and hi-hats, ‘Big Dog’ (as he is known down under) has taken advantage of his linguistic isolation to unshackle his words and ideas, and return to his past and roots. He's the only artist of his kind, a major driving force in the world of a progressive French pop that is set to continue its pyrotechnics.

Introduced to music by his rowdy father and a fistful of onomatopoeia, moving on to percussion (his first instrument was a LU cookie tin) and then drums at the Albi music school, Julien turned to the prog rock of Genesis and then the indie pop of Teenage Fan Club, Flaming Lips and Super Furry Animals as soon as he was able.
His first major group, Aquaserge, basically combined the two genres. Meanwhile, Barbagallo worked on his solo project and also played for some of the finest bands in the land, such as Hyperclean, Bertrand Burgalat and Tahiti 80. Then he met Tame Impala and everything changed. It did not spell the end for Aquaserge, but the band had to rethink its identity without their third pillar. In any case, the bond between them remained.
Now without his crew and family, Barbagallo took off in a new direction.

Grand Chien is the second album released under his own name, written and recorded solo (Julien plays all the instruments) in Melbourne and hotel rooms around the globe ; this album is following Amor de Lonh, distributed online in 2014 by that shadowy promoter of experimental French song La Souterraine (The Underground).
It is not an nth, slightly disdainful indie-pop record deriding the rules of MOR, but an album of French song that looks to every horizon: as much the supremely meticulous English-speaking pop that cultivated Julien’s love of melody (because he did not understand the words) as the lingua franca of France’s literate 80s commercial music (Voulzy, Souchon, Bashung) and the ancestral genres of the Occitan world.

Julien Barbagallo is a fundamentally European, basically French songwriter and that is apparent in every intro, every burst of turbulence and every chorus.
The result is grave but ethereal, a combination that creates a form of alchemy: great, candidly produced French pop (mixed by Rob & Jack Lahana, who, as we know, have worked wonders on records by Phoenix and Sebastien Tellier) that rises from rocky ground into the mesosphere.

Summoning up his past, his musical desires, his nostalgia and his modesty, too, Barbagallo has constructed a strange, welcoming intermediate world, an ‘old weird country’ of landscapes buffeted by intimate squalls and trodden by astral bodies and sublime corporeal guises.