For Lakhdar, the song became a kind of unconscious diary entry. “Long Shore was probably the first song I wrote for this record without even knowing it,” he says. “Sometimes you write songs and you really don’t know what they mean till you look back on them… It’s just another journal entry, a stream of consciousness, a therapy session.”

The video for “Long Shore,” directed by Anthony Sifoni, strips away spectacle in favour of raw energy. Shot in one take against the brick wall of Boutique Feelings’ jam space, it channels the playful, lo-fi charisma of old-school rap clips. “Conceptually, I was inspired by old school rap videos à la Wu-Tang, where it was just people having fun,” Lakhdar explains. “The idea of this project is to keep things simple and have fun doing it. That’s what I tried to do.”

The performance is direct, almost confrontational: Lakhdar dances into the lens, letting the beat guide his movements without choreography or artifice. It’s an honest reflection of the project itself — unvarnished, experimental, and deeply personal.

Boutique Feelings is the latest outlet for Lakhdar, already known as the singer, guitarist, and keyboardist for Montreal psych-rock collective Atsuko Chiba. While that band thrives on sprawling, progressive arrangements, Boutique Feelings distills those instincts into something more beat-driven and intimate. “Whatever I do in Boutique Feelings is a direct result of that relationship [with Atsuko Chiba],” he says. “There’s just this dial inside of me that understands that certain things are for Boutique and others for Atsuko. In the end, things will cross over and I think that’s a good thing.”

That openness to cross-pollination explains the project’s eclectic sound — a fusion of hip-hop, trip-hop, krautrock, psychedelic funk, and electroacoustic experimentation. Lakhdar doesn’t worry about genre boundaries. “I don’t really ever think too much about balancing the sounds. I mostly focus on making sure the different pieces of the puzzle create the whole… Whatever element is added or taken away, I try to do what’s best for the music.”

If “Long Shore” captures the restless churn of modern media, the larger album, Shwaya, Shwaya — Arabic for “slowly, slowly” — takes the opposite approach. Its title is both a tribute to Lakhdar’s Tunisian and Italian roots and a mantra for self-belief. “The idea of Shwaya, Shwaya is less about the step-by-step of writing a record but more about the step-by-step process of actually believing in myself,” he admits. “Self-confidence and self-love were foreign to me and, to a degree, still are. So the title has less to do with the actual music and more about this idea of working on oneself.”

That duality — urgency versus patience, chaos versus clarity — is what makes Boutique Feelings resonate. On “Long Shore,” Lakhdar doesn’t offer easy solutions to the noise of the digital age, but he does create a sonic space to process it, dance through it, and maybe even slow down long enough to hear himself think.