The Blaze are Jonathan and Guillaume Alric, two cousins — both “about 30” years old, they say — who live in Paris. Born in Ivory Coast, Jonathan returned to France as a three-year-old, where he and Guillaume both grew up in small villages, surrounded by the classical music their parents loved. Guillaume later developed a love of reggae, and began producing his own take on dub under the name Mayd Hubb. Jonathan, meanwhile, went to film school in Brussels.

While living there, Jonathan asked Guillaume to help him soundtrack a music video he was making for class, and they began to make music as The Blaze. Their collaborations draw on the warm feel of dub music, but also make use of glittering percussion and mournful vocals (both cousins sing, but their vocals are distorted to sound more or less the same). The result is a hypnotizing, slowly unfurling sound that straddles house and pop, an aesthetic that was first properly unveiled in 2016 with “Virile,” their tender debut video on Brodinski’s Bromance Records.

They released their first album on September 2018, Dance Hall.