Arthur H's seventh studio album is a veritable musical UFO, a crazy kaleidoscopic mix of disco, rock, techno and R&B, an Arthur H-bomb designed to explode in the face of ambient doom and gloom. Over the past month or so, fans of the French pop eccentric have been more than a little surprised to find their idol bopping to disco beats on his latest single, Dancing with Madonna (in the zany video to which Arthur dresses up as H-man, his own take on Superman, complete with red cape, yellow underpants and a capital H emblazoned across his chest!)

Dancing with Madonna, the first single release from L'Homme du Monde, very much set the tone for what was to follow. Waving goodbye to the scatterbrained daydreaming that has infused his music up to this point, Arthur has now turned up the craziness full throttle and headed off to the dance floor instead, inventing his own original fusion of poetic groove, atmospheric funk, hypno-'variété' and techno trance. As for the lyrics on L'Homme du Monde, these verge on the downright surreal. "This album burst out of me like sap rising in spring," Arthur declares, "It sprang from a genuine desire for renewal, a desire to tap into the life force and draw on all that primitive energy. Basically, what I'm trying to do here is push back the limits of what we've been experimenting with live on stage!"

Switching from one musical groove to another on each successive track, Arthur promotes his "positive attitude" in an up-tempo style. Meanwhile, he sweeps fans up into his wildest imaginings, spinning phantasmagorical tales of mystic cowboys, a cosmonaut father and son, weird and wonderful happenings in Lunapark and his hallucinatory encounter with the "hypno-techno-Gypsy-queen." Tapping into his usual mix of fantasy and off-the-wall humour, Arthur blurs the boundaries between dream and reality, between illusion and the material world. "Our imaginary life is indissociable from the real world," he claims, "The imaginary and the real feed into one another all the time."

As for his songwriting inspiration, Arthur claims that "You've got all these different stories floating around in the air at any given time - and it's the stories who choose their author, filtering down into his head through affinity… It's like the start of a relationship between the two. It's all very sensual - even sexual at times!" Arthur admits that the recent birth of his son also has a lot to do with his new drive and energy. "The arrival of a new human being on Earth," he says, "is a physical reminder of the power as well as of the fragility of existence. The moments I've spent with my baby son have made me feel happy to be alive. It's been like this huge bloody explosion going off in my head, urging me to live life to the full!"

The birth of his son (partly) explains the mystery at the heart of the poetic title track on Arthur's new album, L’Homme du Monde. The "man of the world" is, on one level, the being who comes into this world and enters into a father-son relationship, but at the same time also an incarnation of the life force itself. "My new album is about human beings' relationship to the invisible world," Arthur says, "but it goes beyond that, too. It describes the feeling - the sheer joy - of being alive, outside of any belief system, religion or ideas. When it comes to experiencing a direct, immediate, in-the-flesh contact with reality, music is one of the best vectors there is. Music touches the body, the brain and the emotions!"

In short, Arthur H's new album is nothing less than a quasi-philosophical quest, a mystic undertaking on which he has taken the innovative step of getting a young American film-maker by the name of Joseph Cahill to illustrate his songs in video form (available on the bonus DVD). L'Homme du Monde: the Movie recounts the weird and wonderful tale of a mysterious space-time traveller admitted to a psychiatric hospital after an emotional trauma. Here, he tells the resident psychiatrist how his father, the famous cosmonaut Jack Flash, on a quest to find the "Holy Groove", marries Ségolène Royal (who has become the official French president), then embarks on a love affair with the Lady from Shanghai. The affair ends tragically, but a son is born, the Homme du Monde of the title track, who completes his father's quest, discovering a Universal Groove.

Recorded in studios between Paris and Montreal, Arthur H's seventh album is, in fact, a collaborative fantasy elaborated by three madly creative brains – Arthur provided the initial songwriting inspiration and the raw material, Nicolas Repac contributed wild guitar and even wilder samples and the Quebec-based producer Jean Massicotte added his own special flair at the studio controls. The result is an intriguing 'almost-concept' album, which delves into the realm of the autobiographical, the psychoanalytical, the philosophical and the cosmic - which, needless to say, has left most of Arthur H's long-term fans feeling slightly bemused. But take it from us, this strange but remarkably well-produced album is guaranteed to grow on you with every listen.