Review
Genre and Mood
Poni Hoax have always lived between scenes, and The Wild shows it. Post-punk urgency meets the electro of the Paris band’s club years and the indie rock of a five-piece band. The mood is dark and mysterious, the voice of Nicolas Ker leading the band somewhere it does not explain.
Song Summary
The Wild is the third track of Tropical Suite, the band’s fourth album, released by Pan European Recording on 3 February 2017. The credits vary by source: Deezer gives the words to Ker and Laurent Bardainne and the music to Vincent Taeger, Nicolas Villebrun and Arnaud Roulin, while the band’s own upload says composed by Bardainne, written and sung by Ker. The label described the album as a tropical western with a dark, moist, cinematographic disco feel, a record that brought brass and solos into a band that had avoided them; The Wild, it said, is one of the songs that keep the group’s established sound of guitars, bass and drums.
Musical Breakdown
The Band
The upload credits Nicolas Villebrun on guitar, Vincent Taeger on drums, and Bardainne and Roulin on piano: a rock unit rather than the brass and solos the label points to elsewhere on the album. The track was mixed by Shane Edwards at Karma Sound Studio in Thailand.
The Voice
Ker’s delivery is the centre. Beehype described the album’s vocals as cold, and that chill sets the tone: the band can be danceable, the voice keeps it shadowed.
The Remaster
The version embedded here is the remaster by Adrien Pallot at ChabMastering, taken from the 2025 compilation Greatest Hits: Everything Is Real.
Concepts in Focus
post-punk grew out of punk at the end of the 1970s, keeping its urgency while opening it to dance rhythms, synthesizers and darker, more literary singing. Poni Hoax inherit that manner directly: Beehype heard post-punk urgency and a danceable funk-rock sound in Tropical Suite, and compared parts of it to Interpol and David Bowie. Listen for a rhythm section that could carry a club track while the voice pulls it into shadow, much as in Mount Sims – New Authority Volunteers.
remastering prepares a finished recording again at its last stage, adjusting loudness, tonal balance and dynamics without touching the arrangement. The Wild is a neat case: the remaster carries the same ISRC as the 2017 album track, which marks it as the same recording, and runs to the same length. What changes is the overall sound, not the performance.
Artistic Context
Poni Hoax formed in Paris in 2001, when four instrumentalists who had met at the Conservatoire found their singer, Nicolas Ker, in a local bar. Their first album came out on Tigersushi in 2006, with Budapest, which Pitchfork placed among its top 100 tracks of that year; later albums came on Pan European Recording. Ker died on 17 May 2021 at the age of 50. Taeger also drums on Mélissa Laveaux – Generous Bones.
Impact and Reception
Beehype found the album grandiloquent and sometimes a bit too much, but praised the moments where everything fits. The label also issued a Buvette rework of The Wild. Tropical Suite is the last album in the band’s discography before Ker’s death. Play it late, in the dark, and let the voice lead.
