“Touch the flame” - Simon Romain Jean
Photo Credit: Official Artwork, Nicolas Joos
In an era where music can feel overly polished and digitally dressed-up, Touch the Flame by Swiss singer-songwriter Simon Romain Jean grabs you by the collar with its gritty honesty and emotional weight. This isn’t your average indie rock single—it’s a live, one-take catharsis. No autotune. No overdubs. Just real instruments, raw vocals, and an actual in-studio audience. The kind of energy that makes you feel like you're not just listening, you're witnessing.
From the opening notes, you can hear the influence of the greats—Jeff Buckley’s emotional sensitivity, Radiohead’s textured alt-rock ambience, Pearl Jam’s grunge honesty, and even a surprising undercurrent of Brazilian storytelling à la Ana Carolina and Seu Jorge. But this is no carbon copy. Simon weaves his own voice, his own emotional fingerprints, into something unmistakably personal.
The track itself is a meditation on the fragility of love—how old wounds and emotional baggage can slowly corrode even the deepest connections. It’s about those moments in a relationship when mistrust creeps in, when anger erupts unexpectedly, and when you're suddenly staring across a room at someone you love and wondering how you got so far apart. It’s heavy stuff, but Simon doesn’t dramatize it. Instead, he sings it with a kind of vulnerable steadiness—clear-eyed and human.
Photo Credit: Nicolas Joos
Vocally, Simon walks a beautiful tightrope between fragile and fierce. His voice isn’t about perfection—it’s about truth. You can hear the tremble in the quiet moments and the conviction when he leans into the flame. Guitarist Sacha Ruffieux adds a sonic twist by running an electric guitar through effects that give it a synth-like texture—haunting, fluid, and almost meditative. Simon Payot, Antoine Petroff, and Nicolas Joos round out the ensemble, each bringing intuitive, live energy that makes this recording breathe. These are collaborators, not session players—you can feel the chemistry.
Recorded at Studio La Fonderie in Fribourg—a place rich with creative history—this song was captured in front of an intimate audience, adding a kind of sacred immediacy to the whole thing. You can almost hear the stillness in the room as people lean in. There's no safety net here. Just artists laying it bare.
What makes Touch the Flame stand out? It’s unfiltered intimacy—the kind of song that doesn’t just play in the background but asks you to sit down and feel something. In a world chasing algorithms and studio perfection, Simon Romain Jean is choosing something much harder: truth, captured live.
If you’re into emotionally intelligent indie rock that’s not afraid to stare pain in the face—think Bon Iver meets Foo Fighters in a Swiss attic during a thunderstorm—then Touch the Flame is for you. It's raw. It's real. And it burns slow, but deep.
“Touch the flame” is available now on all major streaming platforms
