If you miss the days when Deafheaven was heavy, this French band has you covered in fact they are darker and nastier than Deafheaven ever dared. Where they vary from being just another black gaze band is in the intense militant hammering, they aim upon your ears with a machine-like precision that has almost more in common with Meshuggah. A black metal like atmosphere that breaks up some of the relentless weaponized grooves. The midrange vocals have more a bark to them than the scathing howls of black metal. Not unlike how hard-core screaming is used to a more percussive effect.
The songs are very compact, they do not sprawl out into a droning wasteland like many black metal bands. The hard-core attack is the syncopation with swathes of ambient dissonance creating the feeling of waves crashing against rocks. There is some interesting nuance in the drumming. The technical nature of what is going down is the one component that offsets this being easily defined as black metal. The heaviness gives way to more sonic sprawl that is neatly condensed down into the four and a half minutes that is " (A)". it is an instrumental, but still not only works well, but could serve as a lesson into how to do this sort of thing without it just becoming an interlude.
The machine cranks back up and hit you with the robotic grind of aggression on the next song, giving things enough room to breathe to create a pulse that is a little more along the lines of black metal amid the shifting riffs. The vocals are the one element that works off phrasing rather than tone. In other words, much like Meshuggah it is more about where the vocals fall rather than them changing pitch wise. There is little sonically surprising once we get into the thick of "Elle se.." . The last song starts off firmly planted in the formula of heavy they are working off of and they divert with some post-rock gazing. I will give this a 9 it is a very solid and impressive album that finds this band now having my attention.
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