Genre-Bending Artist Habstrakt Discusses Addiction And His ‘Heritage’ LP

With life comes challenges, whether it be overcoming a breakup, dealing with the pain of losing a loved one or worrying about securing a new job after being laid off. French artist Habstrakt, legally known as Adam Jouneau, faced his biggest hurdle in 2016 when he had major back surgery. Not only did the surgery cost him six months of touring, but it also led to depression and a painkiller addiction.

“I got terribly depressed. I got full-on addicted to painkillers. It was a pretty dark moment,” Jouneau says.

After missing a full summer of touring and being flooded with social media that showed other artists having fun, he decided to pick himself back up.

“I cleaned myself up, I finished healing, I got clean, and that’s when I decided to really get serious with music and really work and dedicate a 1,000% of my time to my art,” he says. “That’s also when I realized that I could expand doing visuals, doing designs and everything. That was one of the deciding moments for me moving to America. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to put all my time into it. I’m going to take bigger risks. I’m going to take all my savings. I’m going to move to the other side of the world and pursue my dream.’”

While this was a dark time in his life, Jouneau says he’s grateful that it happened or else he would have stayed comfortable living in France and wouldn’t have pushed himself as creatively as he does now.

“I don’t always believe that things happen for a reason…but [I] believe in making good from something bad,” he says. “Transformation is a big part of your life as an artist.”

Indeed, Jouneau has proven to move outside his comfort zone with his genre-defying sound and his creative abilities in producing video animation, designing graphics and merchandise, drawing his own tattoos and more. The multifaceted creative showcases his unapologetic, energetic and brutally French sound on Heritage, out today, March 31.

The synth-driven LP is masterfully created, boasting bouncy basslines, rap, both snarling and static synths, sultry vocals and more. Heritage features the producer’s ability to transcend genres, noting this is the next step in his career as he felt like he was previously “stuck in a loop.”

“As an electronic music artist, you rinse and repeat making singles,” he says. “I wasn’t really feeling like I was leaving something more meaningful behind me. I also wasn’t really showing the full extent of all the sorts of music that I make. I was just releasing club records and dance records. I’m a dance producer, but there are a lot of nuances to it that I wasn’t really letting myself show.”

The genre-bending artist says he wanted to write an album to tell a cohesive story, leave something behind and create a “time capsule” of himself. He adds that he wanted to make the project physical, so vinyls are being released alongside it. Jouneau says the first release he ever made was on vinyl and is hanging up in his parent’s house in France. He plans to do the same with Heritage, which also represents adding part of his story to the wall.

The LP chronicles his time from when he moved to Los Angeles to the present day. The producer says he only had enough money to pay one month of rent, and then he was broke. He began writing Heritage while sitting on an air mattress with his laptop in an empty apartment with a shoe box on the floor as a makeshift table. The first song he wrote was “Vision.” While it was frequently stuck in his head for five years, he held back on releasing it until now. Jouneau says he felt he couldn’t release “Vision” because he was in the mindset that he had to play a specific style of music.

“I felt what was expected of me as an artist is heavy, bassy club bangers, and ‘Vision’ was not a song like that,” he says. “It was the favorite thing I’d made in a very long time, but [it was] also something that I didn’t want to send the wrong message [about]. I was very worried about that for the longest time, and now I think I completely changed my mindset on optics. This is why I’m so happy to [have] waited until now to put it out. I didn’t feel like it was what was expected of me, which was very wrong and a mistake you should never think of. You make the art, you put it out and you let the people decide.”

Now when he plays the record in a club, he says it receives positive feedback.

Jouneau boasts an impressive catalog, with hits including “Chicken Soup,” “Outer Space” and “Eternity (feat. Lena Leon).” His most notable story while creating a song in the studio is from “Chicken Soup.”

According to the artist, the track, created in collaboration with Skrillex, needed a vocal but they were at a loss for what it should be. Jouneau says he and Skrillex asked the topline to get into the sound booth for 15 minutes and rap, and he improvised the “Chicken Soup” lyrics. Jouneau and Skrillex went crazy, he says, and the two ran up to the vocalist booth with insane energy.

Jouneau may be known for his music, but he also boasts an impressive amount of tattoos, some of which he draws himself. Among his favorite ones that he has is a boy sitting on an apple, which is a nod to a song that his mother would sing him while he was growing up. His other favorite tattoo, though, is of Hello Kitty.

“It’s the purest design in the world,” he says. “It is something about the color, the whole universe…You know when you collect something but you don’t really collect something? But [you have] enough for people to think that you collect something and then all the gifts you get [are] that stuff? I started to have one or two Hello Kitty things in my life, and then my girlfriend bought me so much. My friends buy me so much, my fans give me so much at shows.”

As for what he wants fans to take away from his music, Jouneau says it’s a wide range of sounds, genres and subgenres.

“I want people to see the evolution of an artist, of a person and the different phases you go through,” Jouneau says. “So continuity, for me, is a very important factor because I think you always need to evolve as an artist and you need to constantly push new boundaries. You can look back at all the music that’s been ready throughout the year, see a path and you can connect the dots with personal moments and everything. I try to put all that in my music.”