Kungs’ Out Loud is the album for people who drive alone at night
The French producer’s best work yet arrived quietly in March 2026. If you’ve ever chased a feeling down an empty highway at midnight, this one’s for you.
By The Long Frequency · April 2026 · 7 min read
There’s a specific kind of late night that electronic music was made for. Not the club version surrounded by people. The solo version. The driving to Quicktrip even though I don’t need anything version. Stereo on with a deep bassline and no lyrics playing at a volume that feels slightly too loud.
Kungs’ new album Out Loud, released March 13, 2026, is made for exactly that night.
I’ve been following Valentin Brunel, the French producer from Toulon who records as Kungs since This Girl turned up everywhere in 2016 and I have refused to leave. That track crossed a billion streams on Spotify for a reason: it had a warmth to it that most electronic music sacrifices for energy. Kungs never sacrificed the warmth. Out Loud is what happens when you take that warmth and turn the voltage up.
What Out Loud actually sounds like
The short version: it sounds like someone decided to stop making music for radio and start making music for two specific moments, the peak of the night and the drive home after it. Most albums pick one. Out Loud understands both. Created between Paris, London and Los Angeles, the album has geography in it. You can hear the late nights in each city, the different rooms, the different people who walked into the studio and changed the direction of a track.
Kungs has always been rooted in disco and French house. On Out Loud he lets that root system go deeper. There’s Italo disco in here, that warm slightly melancholy Italian electronic sound from the early 1980s that never quite got the global recognition it deserved. I’ve sat at a bar near the Rialto in Venice at midnight and heard something come through the speakers that felt like it was made specifically for that moment, that light, that water. That’s the feeling Out Loud reaches for.It mostly gets there.
The collaborations, track by track
This is an album built around who Kungs chose to work with, and the choices are interesting.
Get Away with Boys Noize — start here
Galaxy feat. Theophilus London — 80s soul
Light Me Up feat. PNAU — pure euphoria
Nasty feat. Channel Tres — late night standout
Addicted with Chaney — deep cut
Body Talk feat. Stevie Appleton — most emotional
Take Two — pure Kungs
Get Away with Boys Noize is the album’s opening statement and its thesis. Boys Noize, the German producer Alexander Ridha brings a harder, techno-adjacent edge that Kungs has never fully explored before. The collision works because neither artist compromises. It opens the album like someone kicking a door open. You immediately know this isn’t Club Azur.
Galaxy with Theophilus London took years to make. They first tried to record it remotely during COVID, shelved it, reconnected in person in New York, and finally captured what they’d been reaching for. You can hear the time in it. It has the patience of something that was allowed to become what it needed to be rather than what the schedule required. The 80s soul influence is undeniable. It’s off kilter, warm, slightly spacey. London’s vocal sits in the track like it was always there.
Nasty with Channel Tres is the late night standout. Channel Tres the California artist whose voice exists somewhere between spoken word and low frequency soul brings exactly the right energy to Kungs’ warping bassline. This is the track that will end up in DJ sets for the next three years. It has that combination of accessibility and strangeness that makes dance music last.
Light Me Up with PNAU is the purest rush on the album. PNAU the Australian duo behind some of the most euphoric electronic music of the past decade pushed Kungs toward the kind of unguarded emotion he usually keeps out of reach. This track doesn’t hold back.
“Out Loud sounds like someone decided to stop making music for radio and start making music for the moments between destinations.”
Why this matters if you love electronic music
There’s a conversation happening in dance music right now about what it’s for. The streaming era pushed everything toward accessibility with shorter intros, vocal hooks earlier, nothing too challenging. The underground pushed back hard toward music that only works at 4am on a proper system that deliberately excludes casual listeners.
Kungs has always lived in the middle of that argument. Out Loud doesn’t resolve it but it makes a case that you don’t have to. The album moves between club-ready and deeply personal without treating either as a compromise. Get Away hits hard enough for a main stage. Body Talk is quiet enough for a drive home alone.
That range is hard to pull off. Most producers who try end up with an album that feels inconsistent. Out Loud feels coherent because the thread running through it isn’t a genre or a tempo. it’s a mood. The mood of someone fully in their element making exactly the music they want to make, for the people who need it.
The French connection — and why it matters to me
Kungs is from Toulon. That’s southern France on the Mediterranean coast, not far from the Italian border. The Italo disco influence on Out Loud isn’t accidental. That part of Europe has its own relationship with electronic music, one that predates the Berlin techno narrative and the UK rave story. It’s warmer, more melodic, more comfortable with emotion.
I think about this when I’m up late scanning the shortwave bands on my SDR, watching signals drift across the spectrum. Some of the most interesting propagation happens on the lower frequencies. The ones that travel thousands of miles at night by bouncing off the ionosphere. You can pick up European stations in Kansas City on a good night. French radio. Italian stations. Music that was made on a coast I’ve stood on arriving through the atmosphere like a memory.
Out Loud sounds like one of those signals. Like something that traveled a long way to reach you, and arrived exactly when you needed it.
Who this album is for
If you already know Kungs or This Girl meant something to you, Out Loud is the album you didn’t know you were waiting for. It’s more ambitious, more club focused, and more emotionally honest than anything he’s released before.
If you’re new to Kungs, start with Nasty and Get Away. If those land, work backward through his catalog. This Girl still holds up. Never Going Home is one of the best post-pandemic anthems anyone made. Club Azur has moments that will stop you mid scroll.
And if you’re someone who listens to electronic music the way I do, alone, late at night with the headphones on and something running in the background then Out Loud is made for you specifically. It knows what night feels like from the inside.
Some albums are made for the room. This one is made for the drive home from the room. It knows the difference, and it chooses accordingly.
That’s a rare thing. Kungs earned it.