Julien Gagné’s debut Carpark conjugal is going straight into my personal definition of indie. I realise the word covers an absurd amount of music now, but I still use it for records where somebody’s particular taste seems to be making the decisions. My definition has more to do with a record having specific preferences than with a recognisable guitar sound.

Gagné is interested in rap, dream pop and ambient music, and he gives each enough importance to make the joins obvious. I’m fine with those joins. His debut is good, and its slower passages became easier to enjoy once I stopped waiting for them to turn into something more assertive. The pleasure is in following somebody with a particular taste, including the choices that initially take some adjusting to.

A slight rasp in Gagné’s voice gives his almost stubbornly relaxed rapping some texture. On “Down de toute”, the music is melancholy and monotonous, with a dreamy softness around that low-key delivery. The attraction is the roughness of the voice against the dream-pop sound: enough grain to keep the performance from dissolving into its surroundings, enough calm to let the music continue at its own pace.

He sounds comfortable talking over this stuff. After a while, that comfort becomes the attraction. The song stays close to one emotional register, and I can understand somebody wanting it to hurry up. Personally, I started enjoying the persistence. Gagné stays close to that first impression, letting the calm delivery and the dreamy backing remain the main event. For listening at the end of an exhausting day, I’d take this level of intensity.

What sold me on the album, though, was the piano. “Signaux contraires” is an ambient piano track on a record that has already given me good reasons to pay attention to its rapper, and I ended up wanting more of that side of his work. The change is bigger than the description makes it sound. An album can have several genres in its publicity and still spend every song making the same point; here, the ambient passage redirects the listening altogether. I’m fond of this sort of interruption, particularly when it grows out of music that already has a dreamy quality. Gagné takes that quality far enough for it to become a different kind of track. “Je préfère le silence” introduces some cyberpunk colour into the electronic sound, and between those two approaches the record gets much stranger than the opening suggests.

I also want to make a case for the fun bits, because describing this solely as a melancholy album would sell it short. “C’est quoi ton monde?” has a livelier rap delivery, and the title track is probably the most energetic thing here. Gagné can pick the mood up and sound good doing it. The relaxed voice carries over into those brighter stretches, so the personality remains recognisable even as the energy changes. The extra movement suits him, and I’d put the title track near the top of the recommendations for someone coming to this cold. Between that and the piano piece, you get two very different reasons to be interested in the same musician.

The album gets away with a lot on the strength of its mood, and that can make the quieter vocal material blur together. “De moins en moins” belongs to its more lyrical side, while the calm rapping elsewhere makes a different demand on the attention. In a collection this attached to melancholy, I wanted the individual performances to register as strongly as the overall atmosphere. The piano piece does that immediately.

The ending is a good example of why I’d keep that slower side. “Charge chagrine” is a five-minute ballad with ambient elements and a foggy atmosphere, and I’m very happy that Gagné lets it occupy that much of the album. This is my kind of closer. It gives the ambient part of his taste a substantial role in the final song, and the length suits the drawn-out melancholy. After hearing his voice work through different degrees of rap energy, settling into a long ballad is satisfying. The foggy quality is especially effective at the end of a record that has been moving between spoken delivery, electronic colour and something closer to meditation. The ballad is my favourite destination for those interests.

I’d recommend Carpark conjugal to someone who already gets pleasure from quiet rap, dream pop or ambient music and enjoys hearing those interests overlap. I’d choose “Signaux contraires” first, then the closing ballad, with the title track for a more immediate lift. The less distinct vocal passages need more work; the album’s basic temperament is worth preserving. My favourite thing about it is that the ambient tracks are developed ideas with a place in the collection, alongside the more animated rap. He has made a good first album, with a few songs I’d actively recommend over the collection as a whole.