There’s much talk about modern black metal artists avoiding nostalgia. We’ve seen this in the rise of blackgaze and the emergence of post-black metal, most of which comes from France. Mourir are another Gallic complexity that express their antipathy for modern society through the paradox of a sophisticated barbarism. Album number three is clear: are you ready for what hell looks like to a secular mind?
The solemn ceremony of a military execution beat at the start of ‘Feu d’un regard’ sets the tone of Nous, le venin early in the listening experience. Mourir write music in a pressure cooker environment, and it contains less melody than a whistling kettle, which is deliberate. Sometimes, it works. Listen how Olivier Lolmède introduces his vocal projections from a distance, alternating between an ecclesiastical head voice and a terrifying shriek. Many metal artists aim to be atmospheric, but Mourir mean it. The layers of heavy amp gain and fuzzy bass settings will disorientate you like a warning in your stomach.
Much of the action on this LP will remind you of those confrontational avant-garde theatre performances that became popular in the 1990s for masking self-hatred with abstract hostility. On rare occasions, you might even find melody in the jazz chords that Alexandre Berenguer feeds through his distortion pedal. ‘Ennui Ennemi’ is what Mayhem would sound like if they accepted the challenge to learn the music of Ulcerate. Muffled blast beats fight with raspy vocal abrasions and clanging guitar intervals that have no place in the academia of western music theory. It’s hard to extract anything satisfying if you want something tuneful, especially when the chord progressions offer less colour than brushing the teeth of a comb with idle fingers. Again, this is deliberate. Black metal perplexes and pleases at the same time because it has no shame in being unmusical. Is there a genre more misanthropic and yet so self-conscious of how others perceive it? Sticking two fingers up at those that believe music cannot exist outside of a melodic framework is the inevitable outcome.
The problem is the lack of structure to these compositions. You feel like you’re living in the head of a tortured psychotic who’s running low on medication and high on self-destructive thoughts. Can you tell where track two ends and track three begins? Fortunately, they finish the latter (‘Mon rêve animal’) in a minimalist down-tempo exorcism until only the drums remain. The atmospheric death-doom of ‘Je est absent’ is easier to absorb until the blast beats alter the direction and the guitars imitate an overheated printing press filled with propane. The spontaneity of the one-take vocals is admirable here. Music is not just light entertainment. It can be a language of despair, and Mourir know its cadences and phonetics better than most. If only they knew when to stop: this song meanders towards a drought as if asking you to fall over and die.
Penultimate effort, ‘Aux inutiles’, is just as taxing, but it makes you realise that black metal can be evil without drawing on the lore of Satan. This is a horror that exists in the brain of an overthinking mind. It’s the terror that haunts everybody who works in a market society but seldom reaches their consciousness. Listen how a distorted bass attempts to trample over the light tremolo action of the guitar in this song. The abundance of malfunctioning electricity here will wake the deepest sleeper, though Mourir can also induce the latter if you allow your mind to switch off.
There’s only so long you can observe this performance art with widened eyes and a tremor in your hands. Indeed, it’s so unmusical that you don’t want them to spoil it with something as flippant as melody in the closing title-track, and they don’t. That’s fine if you enjoy Deathspell Omega and Blut Aus Nord, but it begs the question: is this what happens when humans become accustomed to chaos and turn it into a banality?
Kirk Houghton
Verdict
Release Date: 10/07/2026
Record Label: Pelagic Records
Standout tracks: Feu d’un regard; Je est absent
Suggested Further Listening: Blut Aus Nord – MoRT (2006), Deathspell Omega – The Furnaces of Palingenesia (2019), Kamra – Unending Confluence (2025)