I first started listening to Benoît Pioulard (real name Thomas Meluch) the winter I lived in Denver. At this time I had few friends and a serious job for which I was under-qualified. In the snowy mornings on the bus to work, I would listen to Lasted and Précis feeling cold and sickly with anxiety. There was something white and icy about the textures that matched my mood. Fundamentally, though, many of the songs were pure pop, teeming with a sweet, catchy electricity. They reminded me that spring would come eventually.

If there is anyone who walks the line between uplifting pop and melancholic ambience as gracefully as Benoît Pioulard, it’s Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction. I would have trouble thinking of a more perfect match for collaboration.

“Etalon,” a track from their collaborative 7-inch, is more on the melancholic side, and some may call it downright depressive. But as it pushes forward, reaching and soaring, optimism reveals itself through the sheets of gloom.

After all, isn’t this music, and a lot of music like it, moody in the way most people are moody? Even the darkest moods cannot escape their air of poignancy. It is difficult to be happy again without wallowing in the sorrow until it transforms into something sublime. To exorcise the demon is to call it forth. “Etalon” performs the everyday miracle of elevating darkness to ecstasy.

Foxes in Fiction & Benoît Pioulard’s beautiful silk-screened 7-inch, featuring “Etalon,” is out now on Wool Recordings. Copies are limited, so snatch it up while you still can. Listen to its other half, “Ground Glass,” below: