Mortal Prophets - French Summer

​Mortal Prophets

French Summer
self-released; 2025

By Dan Weston

French Summer is an album by Anaïs de Nerval and John Beckmann aka Mortal Prophets. It’s eighteen tracks long, but somehow breezy, clocking in just over forty minutes. It plays like a series of fleeting vignettes, musical postcards with just enough ink to sketch an idea before moving on. That brevity feels deliberate, sometimes perplexing but often intriguing.

It opens with “Romp In D Minor Intro,” a soft-focus ambient piece built around pads and piano. There’s a fragile mood to it, almost like the album is inviting you into a dream it’s still unsure about. “Monaco Rendez-Vous” leans more cinematic, but not in a sweeping orchestral way. It conjures something sun-drenched and luxurious, but there’s a jittery undercurrent too. It feels like summer, but it also feels like summer slipping away.

“Bling” is one of the more abstract moments, layering clipped vocal samples over unpredictable beats. It’s scattered and strange, but that’s part of the charm. I liked “Sun Seekers” for its slick grooves and the way it toys with dancefloor expectations. “Swept Away” tilts eastward, borrowing from modal scales and giving the track a meditative feel, while “It's Dope” is exactly that, complete with fluttering woodwind textures and gorgeous vocal lines.

The title track “French Summer” blurs the line between ambient and glitch. “Mushrooms” pulled me in with its noir-like horns and felt like a detour into dream-jazz, the kind of thing you might hear if you fell asleep in the back of a Parisian cab. “Boss A Nova” starts strong with its playful rhythm but never quite explodes in the way I hoped. Still, I appreciated the restraint. “Saint Tropez Tan” brings in a more straightforward beat and a glossy exterior, but it’s “Sommeil” that delivers one of the most gripping listens, an anxious, twitchy dance track that made me sit up straighter. “Tout À Moi” and “Monstre Doux” are standouts too, full of shadowy textures and playful dissonance.

There’s a strange consistency to the track lengths, as if they imposed a hard time limit on every idea. I couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if they’d let a few of these pieces stretch out or spiral further. At times it felt like each track was an unfinished sketch, fragments of something bigger, but that might be the point. French Summer doesn’t try to build one singular arc. It’s more of a mosaic, a drift through moods, styles, and emotional pockets. And for that, I kept wanting to hit repeat.

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