A classical guitar by the fire, then the machines take the second half
On 28 March 2025, Virgin Records France released 22:22, the third album by Polo & Pan. Track nine is Summer Is Almost Over, five minutes and three seconds, and it is the song on the record with no guest singer. Paul Armand-Delille and Alexandre Grynszpan had spent the rest of the album inviting people in: Joseph Mount of Metronomy on Disco Nap, Beth Ditto on Petite Etoile, the collective I.M. YONI on Nenuphar, Kids Return on Bluetopia. This one they kept. It opens on a classical guitar, close and dry, and only later lets the drums through.
The record was built as a studio playground, not a storyboard. Grynszpan, who records as Pan, told Charts in France on 29 March 2025 that 22:22 was the least planned album they had made. Caravelle had been a machine for travelling through space. Cyclorama had been a trip through time. For this one they connected the synthesizers so they could play them with their hands instead of a mouse. Across the sessions they used a LinnDrum, Moog basses and a Jupiter. An assistant sat in the room and started the tape the moment either of them said they had something.
Grynszpan singled out Summer Is Almost Over as the piece that stands for the whole project. The first half stays with that nylon-string guitar. The second half picks up speed. AllMusic, reviewing the album, heard a West Coast breeze and wrote that the track benefits from having only one vocal line. No featured voice covers the join. The guitar states the season, then the machines change the tempo.
You do start with a classical guitar, right there in front of you, as if you were at a campfire. Then suddenly you are swimming in a desert. We used a lot of different methods inside the same track: toms, very analogue things, very digital things. It really stands for the project. That is what we call space jungle.
(Alexandre Grynszpan, Charts in France, 29 March 2025)
The dates around the release were already booked. In the same Charts in France interview, Grynszpan said the Olympia show in Paris fell two days after the album, and that Coachella had them on 13 and 20 April 2025, on the Outdoor Theatre at 8 p.m., the hour Justice had played the year before. In 2019 they had been on the smallest stage. This time the interviewer asked him about being the only French act on the bill, and he talked about the pressure rather than the poster. On 9 January 2026 Virgin issued a Yuksek remix of Summer Is Almost Over. The campfire song now had a club edit.
The join is the idea. A nylon-string guitar says the season is ending, then the machines do not decorate the line. They change the speed. Polo & Pan had built two albums on travel concepts. On Summer Is Almost Over the concept is the gear left patched in, and a track that shows both halves without a featured singer to cover the seam. On a record full of collaborators, Grynszpan treated this one as the summary.
