From inadvertent hit song to experimental film via screeching electro and tortured disco, Quentin Dupieux - AKA Mr Oizo - has one of the most fascinating histories of the French Touch, the kind of artist that fits in nowhere and makes friends everywhere. Oizo’s music can be as far out as Pepe Bradock’s and yet he had a hit as big as Daft Punk, influencing everyone from Kavinsky to Justice to Charli XCX on the way.

These days Dupieux is perhaps best known as a director, responsible for films like Daaaaaalí! and Yannick. Musically, Flat Beat, his 1999 single / Levi’s ad phenomena, remains his calling card, one of the strangest songs ever to top the charts in Austria and Finland. 

You know Flat Beat, though, so I want to go beyond that, into five songs to help you better love Mr Oizo. (The name pronounced, incidentally, like “oiseau”, the French for “bird”.)

Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog

While Flat Beat was a huge hit, I’ve never really thought of it as influential, given that it stood out like a rotted tooth among the gilded French House anthems of the day. So it was fascinating to read an interview with Duke Dumont, in which he posited Flat Beat as both popular on the UK Garage scene and “possibly the first dubstep record”. 

I wouldn’t go that far - although Flat Beat certainly does have a filthily sharp bass line - but you can hear the UKG links on (the excellently named) Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog, Mr Oizo’s follow-up single and a highlight of his debut album Analog Worms Attack. The song has a fabulously stuttering funk to it, the drums programmed with a slightly nervous yet hugely precise 2-step swing, which combines with a jagged Todd-Edwards-cut-up feel to give the song distinct Paris-via-South-London angular disco vibes. 

Stunt

Analog Worms Attack was released on Laurent Garnier’s venerable F Communications label, the hook up coming about after Garnier apparently bought a car from Dupieux’s father. Moustache (Half a Scissor), Oizo’s follow-up LP, was also released on F Com, although it would be his last for the label, with Garnier apparently considering it “unlistenable”.

That’s a bit harsh - although Moustache is certainly a strange record, after Oizo replaced his analogue gear with computers and went deep into the extreme possibilities of editing that digital allows. Xavier from Justice called Moustache “total laptop music… [among] the first records exploring what you can really do with digital means” and he is 100% correct. 

I’ve got a soft spot for the awkward rave of Half a Scissor, the album’s (kind of) title track. But it is Stunt, with Sébastien Tellier, that takes the trophy, its racing electro style reminiscent of a Kavinsky record left to rot on a sandy beach, which actually makes it one of the most straight-forward songs on the album.

Skatesteak

Oizo worked with Tellier again - and SebastiAn - on the soundtrack to his 2007 film Steak, a work I have never seen but suspect is deeply twisted nonetheless. 

From that soundtrack Skatesteak, by Oizo alone, is one of the most bizarrely jolly songs in the producer’s catalogue, a kind of techno knees up with a melody that suggests dark goings on behind the surface, emphasised by the drip drop of faltering oddity to the song’s rhythm, like the Blue Peter theme remixed by a pervert Kraftwerk.

Bruce Willis Is Dead / Gay Dentists

Oizo has never turned his back on Flat Beat and Flat Eric, the alarmingly stretched yellow puppet he invented for the Levi’s ad, which went on to become a phenomena in its own right.

Almost a decade on from Flat Beat, Eric featured on the cover of Lamb’s Anger, Oizo’s third and best studio album, the once popular children's toy about to get a razor blade through the eyeball, Un Chien Andalou style. It’s an appropriate image for a record that combines the best and brightest of Oizo’s melodic ear with a lavish spread of his oddball brilliance. 

So much do I love Lamb’s Anger, that I have been unable to choose just one song from it, so I present you with two, both of which show the album’s clever balance of dance music’s sonic staples with innovative production technique, the extremities of Moustache jammed into Flat Beat’s unlikely dance-floor blush.

Bruce Willis Is Dead is a gothic and very silly rave song with a perfectly dramatic synth riff at its heart, which scampers around like a Scooby-Doo villain, slowing down and speeding up as drama demands. Gay Dentists, meanwhile, is disco house being attacked by malevolent forces, all stop-start record slips, melodic wobbles and rhythmical traps that adds up to three and a half minutes of gloriously idiosyncratic dance floor gold, as the sheer funk force of the Bohannon sample at the song’s heart wins out over evil.

(Honestly, the whole of Lamb’s Anger is fantastic - but, if you must sample the record, make sure you try Positif, later sampled by Missy Elliott and Skrillex on RATATATA; the honking saxophone funk of Cut Dick and Two Takes It. At the very least.)

End of the World (feat. Skrillex)

It feels wrong to fast forward through Rubber, Oizo’s soundtrack to his own film of the same name in the company of Justice’s Gaspard Augé; through the pointed (if not particularly revelatory) 2011 album Stade 2; and The Church, Oizo’s debut for Brainfeeder. 

And yet fast forward we must, in order to arrive at All Wet, an album that feels like a misjudged attempt to build commercial bridges, with high-profile guests including Charli XCX (on Hand in the Fire), Peaches, Boyz Noize and - on End of the World - Skrillex himself.

All Wet is far from the best Oizo album and, frankly, a lot of the collaborations fall flat. Hand in the Fire, notably, is about one tenth as good as you think it’s going to be. But hooking up with Skrillex made sense: Skrillex has said that Oizo was one of his inspirations when he started making music and you can hear Oizo’s maximal style and fidgety inspiration in a lot of Sonny’s work.

Plus, End of the World does a pretty nifty job of showing what can happen when you blow Oizo’s production style up to the large scale, a classic Think break colliding against a hands-in-the-air piano riff and a weirdo vocal about the end of the world, just big enough for Skrillex and just strange enough for Oizo, his dainty skip between commercial success and out-and-out artsiness standing perfectly resolute. 

Some listening

Dianka y La Bien Querida - Chiquitita, Matona!

A truly, beautifully bizarre song from this Catalan / Basque hook up, which kicks off with the orchestral electronic dread of Wendy Carlos’s Clockwork Orange soundtrack, drifts into flamenco-ish guitar, adds on a load of ridiculous synth pop effects then ramps up the drama about 1,000% to create a song that makes hyperpop sound conservative, all the while criticising the dumb machismo of the music industry. The three minutes of Chiquitita, Matona! have enough adventure to sustain a musical library for a decade but they seem to pass by in the blink of an eye.

300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks - The Ballad of St. Nick’s Park

Ah to be young….300SkullsAndCounting mix screamo, breakcore and chiptune with rapping that screams of getting drunk on cider on rural Engish park benches. They are, apparently, linked to “the NYC-based ‘Sex Emo’-adjacent scene”, something I am far old to know anything about.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, on their new single 300SkullsAndCounting link up with London bassline producer Jenny Sparks for a song that is pure teenage stupidity, like a bassline Ramones or a solidly middle class Blackout Crew, crossed with a bizarre baroque pop edge. I am 100% not the target market but the song - and especially the video - are so charmingly true to their own particular logic that it is hard not to love them.

Fundido & Nieri - Nuova Persona (Bliss mix)

Madonna’s return to the dance floor on her recent album has proved what we all suspected, namely that people talking over New York-style house beats is an absolutely inescapable jam. The impossibly glamorous - in my mind anyway - combination of NYC duo Fundido and LA-via-Milan artist Nieri takes this self-same idea for a celebratory strut around the block on the Bliss mix of their Nuova Persona collaboration, a song with a perfect New York skip to its beats, a bass line that bubbles like a champagne jacuzzi and a vocal that comes across like Vogue of the Dolomites.

Manami - Turning Point

Imagine you’re on top of Mount Dubstep, trying to ignore the filthy peaks of Mount Brostep, just to your right. You roll a stone down the mountain side and watch as it slowly gather momentum, then drops off into a chasm. This is how Turning Point, by Bristol-based producer Manami, sounds. Which is an elaborate way of saying the song has a scuttling, corporeal bass line, drums that hit like dray-horse hooves and a fantastically refined sonic texture. As it should, really, being the first song taken from a new Tectonic Sound compilation, which kind of ties in to the label’s 20th anniversary last year.

Pixies - Go Man Go

Most people would die just to have a song rejected by the Pixies, so the idea of a song rejected by both peak Pixies and peak Breeders - as was the case with Go Man Go, which was recorded for both Bossanova and Last Splash and ended up on neither - is basically divine.

The song, which has just turned up on the 2026 remaster of Bossanova, is a Kim Deal-sung, totally dreamy number that seems to date from the pre-rock and roll era and which you could imagine Audrey Hepburn crooning out of a cupboard in one of her early films, as birds swoon all around.

Things other people have done

Andrew Hickey - Song 186: Frownland by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band

If you’re not listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Andrew Hickey’s remarkably well researched and pretty much definitive history of rock music in podcast form - then you really should be. 

Every episode is a gem. But Song 186, released last week, is particularly brilliant, taking two hours and 40 minutes to patiently recount the story of Captain Beefheart and his magnum opus Trout Mask Replica, an album more held in awe that actually appreciated. 

My favourite part if when Hickey goes into the incredibly precise and yet totally bizarre songwriting process for Trout Mask Replica, which could, perhaps, unlock the album for anyone who has never been seduced by its charms.

For example: “[John “Drumbo”] French’s job was to transcribe Van Vliet’s ideas, and also to make them musically workable. So for example, Van Vliet might come up with a figure that was five beats long, and insist that it be played along with another figure that was three beats long. French would then have one guitarist play the three-beat figure five times while the other guitarist played the five-beat figure three times, so both guitars would come back together after fifteen beats and they could move on to the next section of the song. He would usually write his own drum parts, and these would be written not to provide the normal rock backbeat, but instead to find a middle path between the different rhythms of the other instruments.”

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest