IAM's new album opens with Stratégie d’un pion, a wall of massive sound that reverberates through France's musical landscape with the force of a top-of-the-Richter-scale earthquake. Stratégie d’un pion sets the tone for the rest of the album: 78 minutes, 59 seconds and 18 tracks of finely-chiselled rap performed by three of French hip hop's finest. Waiting to spring beneath the eye of the tiger on the cover, IAM's long-awaited offering packs a powerful punch, delivering everything from sweeping violins and full-scale orchestra (courtesy of Bruno Coulais) to thumping infra-bass. FulI force – in the most positive sense of the word! And the guest list is no less impressive either, featuring chart-topping diva Beyoncé (from Destiny's Child), Syleena Johnson and rap heavyweights Redman and Method Man who step into the ring on the first single release, Noble art.

RFI Musique hooks up with Chill/Akhenaton, Jo/Shurik’N and ex-dancer-turned-MC Malek le Freeman and find that the trio share the mike in interviews as readily as they do on stage. IAM, a three-strong force to be reckoned with!

In the early days of your career your albums were full of references to ancient Egyptian mythology and Egyptian film epics. Then, on the last couple of albums you seemed to move in more of a spiritual, Eastern direction. But the new album doesn't seem to have any special theme…
Akhenaton: No, there's no concept this time round…

Apart from the three of you, maybe?
A. and Shurik’n (speaking together): …Apart from life itself, maybe! Freeman: And that's life with a capital L, not the life some people lead, you know, ghettoised life, day-to-day grind.
A: It's all about living life in a better way - and living life in a better way doesn't necessarily mean living in greater material comfort! It means living in a better world. That's where the album title Revoir un printemps(See Another Spring) comes from. If you take a look around you at what's happening in the world right now it's plain to see the human race is going through a pretty depressing cycle. There are some very serious political things going down on the international scene.

It's interesting, the key word in what you're saying seems to be "life." And, of course, your own lives have changed radically since the beginning of your career. Hands up anyone who's got a kid now?
(All three hands shoot up!) That pretty much answers your question, doesn't it?
A: But that's where this desire to live in a better world comes from, it's for our kids, you know.
S: Just because we're rappers doesn't mean we're cut off from the cycle of normal human life. OK, we're MCs, but behind the MC – and before that MC came along even – there's a man and that man's tuned into the cycle of evolution. It's just that he bumped into the MC a little further down the road!

So the fact that you've all become fathers is maybe one of the reasons fans have had to wait seven years for the new IAM album?
(In a loud chorus): No, definitely not!
S: You have to realise L’école du micro d’argent required an enormous amount of time and effort what with touring and developing the album. After that I think we all needed a bit of time to breathe. During the tour actually some of us, including me, had already started working on projects outside the group. So when the IAM stuff more or less came to a halt everyone got on with his own business. Freeman, Akhenaton and me, we all had different projects on the go – and they weren't the kind of projects you could complete in a couple of days. Let me tell you, when you get involved with produ

It's funny, but you don't come across as all that optimistic on your new album…
S: No, that's because that's what's going in our personal lives. That's normal, though, because the fact that we've moved on in our personal lives means we've become more aware of things on another level. We've got a clearer take on life now. Reaching a certain stage in life may make other people calm down, but we seem to find more reasons to get worked up. That's because we're more aware of what's going on round us. Basically, we're more mature these days. We're looking at the world through different eyes than we were ten years ago.

You've certainly chosen to speak out about a lot of different issues…
S: The issues are what fuels our songwriting on the whole.

But I have to admit listening to the album I'm not sure I completely understood all the words and phrases you use…
F: Well, we do invent our own language sometimes. That's my fault I guess, I tend to be the one who makes words up. But he's the real word obsessive (points to Akhenaton).

I get the impression all three of you are, aren't you?
S: Yes, but in different ways. We don't use the same vocabulary. I don't think we're complicated in the same ways with the same words. But it's always been a deliberate move in our songwriting to push language to the limits. It's always the same, though, inaccessible art may be more beautiful but it's more useless. It's all about getting the balance right so that you make things simple, beautiful – and explicit!

But not too explicit?!
S: Well, in that case, simple enough to make yourself understood the way you want to be.

You've always avoided covers and using over-obvious samples in your work…
A: No, we've never been into that…Apart from with Le Mia, of course.
S: And that was because the concept of Le Mia called for it.
A: Basically, we're not hit makers. We leave that to Puff Daddy and the rest of them. They're good at it, but it's not really our niche.

And your 'niche' as you put it is an essential one. You're more or less the godfathers of French rap these days…
A: Let me just say, French rap is in the state it is because it was rejected at a certain moment in time. There was this reactionary backlash from certain sectors of the media and certain record companies that are now managed exclusively by directors from the finance industry. You have to realise these days it's the finance men who hold all the power. That's the way it is in newspapers, radio and TV too - and it's artistic creativity that's paying the price!
Rap's still a victim of its own clichés - despite the fact we've spent 15 years trying to go deeper than that! The problem is, even within the rap world itself I don't think enough effort has necessarily been made to break out of those clichés. There are some really original rap groups out there, but they're not always the ones who are pushed up front. I think there are definitely efforts to be made on that score. Anyway, that's something positive. Work simply needs to be put in to bring French rap up to scratch. Even if we could just raise it to the same level as American rap that would be something because even though American rap doesn't put across much in terms of a message it can still be amazingly creative when it comes to production.
S: We're not calculating kinds of guys, you know!
A: And we're not age demagogues either. If we really wanted to boost our record sales we'd try and write lyrics that'd appeal to 17-year-old kids… But we prefer to adopt the same approach.