Racine carrée by Stromae

Racine carrée, the second album from Belgium's Stromae, landed digitally on 16 August 2013 on Vertigo, with the physical release following three days later in France and Belgium. The title means 'square root', and Paul Van Haver wrote, composed and produced the lot himself, recording it in an attic and blending his 1990s-flavoured dance beats with Caribbean and African rhythms.

The beats make you move, but the words sting. The songs take on social-network loneliness, broken relationships, discrimination, smoking and lung cancer, AIDS and absent fathers, and critics praised the lyrics enough to compare him with Jacques Brel. "Papaoutai", "Formidable" and "Tous les mêmes" all went to number one, the album topped the charts in France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy, and in France it passed a million sales within four months and went quadruple diamond.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.