French avant-gardists, Non Serviam, are conscious of being original. Sometimes artists are original without trying too hard or over-analysing everything they do. This is not the case with Non Serviam. They have the ingredients from different palates and want to force them together. La Lune Dont Mon Âme Est Pleine is their third full-length recording, and it’s as incongruous as it is interesting.
Heavy layers of guitar distortion and glitchy electronics exist in an ethereal dayglow for most of ‘La Lune dont mon âme est pleine – Part II’. The ambience is unique when you add in the shrieking black metal vocals. One thing is clear: Non Serviam know how to use textures in electronic music (which their country is famous for), but they decided to make the structure directionless. This is a problem that’ll repeat itself throughout the listening experience. Yet there are some genuine moments of brilliance here. The baroque harpsichord timbres of ‘Déesse morte’ are stunning in their beauty, the hallucinating female vocals even more so. Why they impose an aggressive spasm of screaming on this landscape is understandable – they love the paradox. But their honourable pursuit of originality spoils the harmony.
As an avant-garde metal artist, the French group are at their best when operating outside their black metal foundations. In other words, the metallic aspects are a sideshow, and the darkwave aspects are far more interesting. To be fair, they do it with full commitment when they go all in on the Axis of Perdition / Anaal Nathrakh noise dimension. This deserves praise, but the competing layers of sound – many of them sampled, some of them ambient tape recordings – leave ‘Emile Henry’ with no centre ground. Imagining Atari Teenage Riot as an industrial black metal band is not as fun as it sounds.
The glitchy blackened death metal of ‘Victory to Kali’ is much better. Mirai Kawashima of Sigh lends his talents to this glorious piece of audio pollution. The vocals conjure images of a person ripping their guts out in defiant pain. And the one time the contrast works is when they follow it with the hypnotic choral melodies of ‘La Valse des enfants morts’. Using samples from a children’s choir in this dream pop nightmare is the ingenious ingredient. A deep chug of the guitar strings in ‘Everything About You’ continues in the same vein with piano sprinkles and divine choir vocals to enthral you during the turbulence. ‘Actéon’ completes this aggressive radiance as if completing a trilogy. This section of the album is one of the few coherent movements on the whole record.
The attention to detail on this LP is admirable. Every song ends on the sixtieth second, and the music has as many layers as a French onion. But the execution is often incongruent. Closing track, ‘La Lune dont mon âme est pleine – Part III’, confirms that fusing darkwave with black metal and post-rock is difficult, and few artists have attempted what Non Servian do here with such brazen ambition. That’s the paradox. La Lune Dont Mon Âme Est Pleine is an honourable failure. Repeat listens might even eradicate the failure part if you can tolerate musical compositions that saunter with an aimless drift.
Kirk Houghton
Verdict
Release Date: 12/06/2026
Record Label: Lay Bare Recordings
Standout tracks: Déesse morte; Victory to Kali; La Valse des enfants morts
Suggested Further Listening: The Axis of Perdition – Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital (2005), Gnaw their Tongues – Reeking Pained and Shuddering (2007), Dismal – Via Entis (2023)