Produced by Ed Bangers’ SebastiAn (Frank Ocean, Kavinsky) and mixed by Tom Elmhirst (Adele, Lorde, David Bowie), the album features collaborations with Sir Paul McCartney, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Connan Mockasin and Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire, Caribou).

Having previously written lyrics with Jarvis Cocker and Air on ‘5.55’ (2006) and Beck on ‘IRM’ (2010), ‘Rest’ is the first album where Gainsbourg penned all the words. Feeling daunted by the desire to poetise her ideas, deliverance would arrive initially courtesy of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who provided the music for the title track, steering Charlotte toward a forensically focused approach to lyric writing. “Those were the first words that I actually sang on the album. I came in with all my bunches of lyrics… It was too much, really, and Guy-Man was saying, ‘you can’t say all that, you have to simplify it,’ and he reduced it to three words! It felt so innocent in a way, but it was exactly what I needed at that time”. On the album, Gainsbourg addresses personal topics ranging from the death of her father Serge and more recently sister Kate Barry, to the tensions between her shyness and her life as a performer and public figure, to charmingly illogical childhood fears.

The album’s major production lynchpin would be French DJ, remixer and producer Sebastian Akchoté-Bozovic, aka SebastiAn, best known for his releases on French house label Ed Banger and for his production work for Frank Ocean. His background in electronic music accorded with Charlotte’s desire for a sound with a disquieting, mechanistic edge, inspired by Giorgio Moroder and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a revered, award-winning film actress, movie soundtracks, particularly Pino Donaggio’s score for Brian De Palma’s ’70s horror classic Carrie and Georges Delerue’s music for Jean-Luc Godard’s nouvelle vague masterpiece Le Mepris, as well as the chilly, unsettling ambience of films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Hitchcock’s Rebecca.