BIOGRAPHY
His name is Hugo Barriol, he’s 28. After winning the Métro Music Awards, the young man has since gone out of the subway stations and embarked on French singer Alain Chamfort’s 2017 tour as the opening act.
After a trip to Australia where he took his first steps as a “subway singer”, Hugo Barriol went back to Paris. Coming back to music was a pressing need. Freed from his music bands, successively The Handcuffs and Enjoy Walace, the young man continued the Australian adventure in the Parisian subway at the Bonne Nouvelle, Nation and Saint-Michel stations before settling in at Pigalle. A performance in the morning, another at the end of office hours, four hours of music in a day in total where the songs, original compositions emanating from emotional break-ups, joined the underground reverberations like the subconscious catching you up with a powerful, full-blown, snatching up voice. “The subway forced me to find my voice, to draw from unsuspected hidden corners. I sang dozens and dozens of times the same songs, the interpretation of which progressively became refined.” Like a dancer perfecting the same move for hours. Because “to express myself in English requires the music to even better translate the emotions described in my lyrics.”
On the first day that he put up his amp and mic stand, a producer handed his business card over to him, like the casting director of The Voice later invited him to join his show. But he wants to sell his music, not himself… Hugo Barriol preferred focusing on his music and by the summer of 2015, he entered the studio to record a first five-track. Majestic strings brushing against the wood of a folk guitar with a metallic saddle, warm voice, emanating from the guts and self-assuredly sweeping across a cartography that stretches from Jeff Buckley to Bon Iver, from José Gonzalès to Thomas Dybdhal. Prayers can be heard there. The first track that was recorded is called On The Road. If we remember it, it is because it probably marks the beginning of a long and fruitful road.
