Touring Luxembourg with Francis of Delirium, the indie star making big waves in a tiny country

Jana Bahrich’s hands are shaking tonight. She announces this to the crowd, about 250 people, at Luxembourg’s Rotondes club, holding them up with an exaggerated trembling motion. We’re at the album release show for Francis of Delirium — the project helmed by Luxembourg-based Bahrich, with bassist Jeff Hennico and drummer Denis Schumacher joining her for live shows — as she drops her debut full-length, ‘Lighthouse’.

The sense of occasion is palpable. At the front, groups of teenagers sing along to every song, brand new ones included. Further back, older fans with beers are cheering and hooting. “Who has been to a Francis of Delirium show before?” Bahrich asks at one point – seemingly the whole room responds. “Who hasn’t? Like, five people?” After the gig, a middle-aged fan chats with Bahrich at the art installation she’s set up in the venue lobby, a mixture of her paintings and props arranged to mimic her bedroom. “If you’re from here and you don’t know Francis of Delirium…” he says, with a shrug that means “then you don’t know shit“.

The nerves were understandable, then, if unfounded. Bahrich, 22, is such a natural rock star that she’s become her tiny country’s (population 663,000) buzziest indie export. The string of EPs she’s released since 2020 have been greeted with global critical acclaim, and her band has toured through Europe, the UK and North America. In her home country, she’s even big enough to have attracted some haters. “Rotondes announced the show on their Facebook, and someone wrote, ‘Encore?’ [‘Again?’]” Bahrich tells me before she heads off to soundcheck. “Like, ‘Francis of Delirium again?’ We’ve played here too much, people are pissed off!”

Before the show, we meet in Luxembourg City centre, where Bahrich plays tour guide for the morning. She moved here aged 13; her parents are international school teachers from Canada, so she’d previously lived in Antwerp, Zurich and Vancouver. As a teenager, she’d check out touring bands whenever they came through; watching the likes of Alex G, Car Seat Headrest and Snail Mail, who took a DIY approach at least in their early days, it felt within her reach to make music herself.

Soon she found out that a school friend was playing in a ‘school of rock’-style band founded by a Luxembourg-via-Seattle musician called Chris Hewett. He’d started it with the intention of giving his kids a chance to play live gigs. “The main way that you get into playing music here is through conservatories. You have to do a year of theory and then you can start playing music,” Bahrich says. (There are three conservatories across the country, which train kids in classical music from the age of six.) “He just wanted them to be playing music [without going through the conservatory system].”

Bahrich and Hewett, 30 years her senior, started jamming together, and they soon became Francis of Delirium. (Though no longer an official band member, Hewett is still her producer and studio drummer.) Thanks largely to the bookers at Rotondes, the city’s leading venue for alternative acts, it wasn’t long before they were mainstays of the city’s indie scene.

There being any alternative music scene at all in Luxembourg is relatively new, Bahrich tells NME as we head down the steps to the Pétrusse Valley, a quiet green space that cuts through the city centre. Until maybe the mid-2000s, the few bands there were would have to head into Belgium to play “local” shows, because there were no rock venues in Luxembourg. School-leavers tend to go to neighbouring countries for university, so maintaining a youth culture is hard.

But over time, a network of artists, promoters and venues has grown, though it’s still a fledgling thing. There are benefits to being in a smaller scene, Bahrich says  – Francis of Delirium have already landed local support slots with The 1975 and Kings of Leon. “That wouldn’t happen anywhere else. You’re getting to play stages that you don’t really deserve to play yet, so you’re kind of just learning on your feet.”

After taking in the storybook-pretty old town – replete with spired roofs and pastel pinks and yellows, plus the remnants of a castle – and heading back into the city centre, we bump into a friend of Bahrich’s, Georges. He’s a musician, booker and a relative veteran of Luxembourg’s scene. He and some friends are celebrating at a bar after a positive meeting with the government’s Ministry of Culture, held with a view to securing financial support for a festival they’re launching. The government, as well as several other organisations offering grants, is heavily involved with arts funding here.

“A lot of the infrastructure is ready for there to be a real community, a really big scene,” Bahrich says. “But I wish that there were more young people starting bands. I think that people just don’t even realise that it’s something they can do. That’s something I wanna try to encourage. It’s all pretty new, so I think it’s just gonna take some time to get everybody on board.”

If Francis of Delirium are at the vanguard of putting Luxembourg on the indie map, ‘Lighthouse’ is the perfect album to do it. Capturing a similar melancholy sparkle to indie favourites such as Japanese Breakfast and Snail Mail, its 11 tracks encapsulate both bittersweet, desperate yearning and a breathless new romance; throughout, the golden-hour world they live in is astonishingly vivid. Bahrich’s choruses, almost every one, are lump-in-your-throat gorgeous.

The album has a much lighter touch – and feels prettier and more delicate – than FoD’s grungier earlier work. The change was inspired, in a number of ways, by the band’s 2022 US tour. In the van, Bahrich matched the feeling of the open road by listening to greats like Simon & Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell . She also became a fan of their touring buddies, The Districts, who play a sweetly soulful style of indie. Besides the newfound musical inspiration, the month-long tour was so life-affirming and fun that Bahrich came home in a giddier headspace than before. Once she got home, she fell in love with her now-girlfriend, an old pal from school.

The album began with jamming sessions at Hewett’s house; it was mostly recorded there, apart from two songs which were done at London’s Assault & Battery Studio. “Because we were kind of in this jamming routine, the songs just suddenly started mirroring my headspace sonically. I just kept pulling towards this feeling of lightness,” Bahrich says, having led us to a cosy café piled high with vintage art and books. One of the record’s darker tracks, ‘Cliffs’, felt like it wasn’t making sense until Bahrich and Hewett added piano, strings and acoustic guitar to the second verse. This gave it a dreamy, floating feeling. “It felt like, OK, now this is working, because there’s more light pouring into the song,” Bahrich says.

All told, the album is the most complete and adult vision of Francis of Delirium so far. “I feel like I’m more deliberate in choosing the world that the songs live in,” Bahrich says. “It’s all just trying to get to the most honest spot in me that I can. Not that I wouldn’t like to still write stuff that’s heavier. But it feels like the biggest thing is just kind of opening myself up to more of my brain – like not condensing myself down into this little ball.”

If ‘Lighthouse’ wasn’t proof enough that Luxembourg has something special in Francis of Delirium, tonight’s show at Rotondes certainly is. Onstage, they’re undeniable – their presence confident and fully-formed, the playing road-tested and tight, the songs effortlessly taking control of the whole room; and it seems like everyone in attendance knows it. Maybe some of the kids at the front will go home and start their own band. Maybe Francis of Delirium aren’t just big fish in a small pond, but the start of a new wave.

‘Lighthouse’ by Francis of Delirium is out now via Dalliance

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