Alcest - Darkness converted into light

From its raw beginnings as a side-project of the band Peste Noire to the success of more mature, contemplative works. The story of Stéphane Paut (aka Neige), the unknown French kid who made possible a surprising marriage between black metal and shoegaze

by Mauro Roma, Andrea Vascellari

Alcest was born in 2001 as a side project of the band Peste Noire: originally a trio, with Neige (Stéphane Paut) on vocals and percussion. Their first work is the demo Tristesse Hivernale, containing four naive speed/black metal songs with an irritating growl vocal recorded in extremely low fidelity (the release, originally only put out on cassette, would be reissued in 2007 as a split with Angmar).

The project was shelved almost immediately, and it wasn't until 2005 that Neige revived the Alcest moniker, which from that point on would effectively become his one-man band.

Le Secret is therefore a fresh start: made up of just two very long songs, the EP is marked by constant shifts in atmosphere. The more traditional metallic explosions keep alternating with arpeggiated moments of introspection (notable is the circular structure of the title track, which opens and closes with the same arpeggio accompanied by background birdsong).

Although some moments could certainly have been polished further, Neige proves he's learned the lesson of “Loveless” well when he builds repetitive, hypnotic walls of distortion.

2007 sees the release of Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde, with which Alcest finally delivers not just small glimpses but an entire collection of snapshots of his world laden with spleen, abandoning the extreme leftovers entirely to devote himself exclusively to a revitalizing form of magical, naive shoegaze of devastating emotional power. Layer upon layer of guitars welcome the listener with a majestic, elaborate intro, then a brief acoustic interlude, children's voices, and then “Printemps Emeraude” bursts into a blinding triumph of colors, a heart-wrenching melody, a wall of sound soaring to unreachable heights.

Long songs, a calm and confident pace, Neige knows how to take all the time needed to let his frescoes hit with their full evocative power. The title track opens with a reassuring acoustic arpeggio, before pressing down on the distortion pedal again and dishing out another unforgettable melody and another wall of guitars blazing with passion. “Les Iris” slows the pace down even further, the mood turns less cheerful and more meditative, the guitars seem to tremble with unhappy memories. Yet Neige's voice remains light as a feather even when, in the finale, it finds itself immersed in spacious, turbulent arrangements.

What ultimately prevails is a certain sweetness, pervading both the sun-drenched, bucolic scenery – steeped though it is in endless melancholy – of “Ciel Errant”, and the desperate romanticism of the extraordinary “Sur l’autre rive je t’attendrai”, where the female voice (Audrey Sylvain) lends further purity to the airy melodies painted by Neige.

“Tir nan Og” closes the record on playful, “holiday-evening” tones, at least until a pensive acoustic passage slightly darkens the mood. But the finale picks up that same feather-light flight again, leading, in a fade-out, toward the exit from the muffled dream that Neige has conjured.

Two magnificent new tracks, included on the Split EP with Les Discrets, offer intriguing extensions of the dreamy weave of the debut (and “Percées De Lumière” once again brings a fierce screaming vocal to the fore).

Guided by moonlight, by nocturnal breezes and tides, the second album distances itself from “Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde”: the tone has become noticeably more mature, and more bitter. Écailles De Lune is a record built around its imposing title track, which, split into two parts, occupies the first twenty tumultuous minutes of the album.

The shift away from the fairy-tale, enchanted tones of the debut toward a far more tangible frustration is immediately palpable; Alcest's melancholy turns raw and visceral. It wastes no time, hurling the first memorable, desperate riff at the dark sky. The melodic journey then continues intensely through pauses, digressions and fresh surges, with yet another devastating riff closing the first part and the furious opening of the second part (the screamed vocals return too) providing the most gripping moments. The same goes for the extraordinary “Percées De Lumière”, already released as a single on the split with Les Discrets, which bursts in with its pulsing blend of urban indie-wave and searing black-metal fury, following the lesson of the wonderful, dearly missed Amesoeurs, the band that, alongside Alcest, made mastermind Neige one of the most prominent names in metal's modern evolution.

Past the halfway mark, however, the album seems to lose its forward momentum. The colourless, slow-motion pop harmonies of “Solar Song” drift by, and the record fades out with the lulling “Sur L’océan coleur de fer” — fine music, but unable to recapture the usual, genuine magic, never quite rising above a mere exercise in style.

An album torn between contemplation and furious, unfulfilled passions, an album of violent, inconclusive contrasts. Little Neige has grown up: he looks at the moon, at the sea, and still longs to rise toward another world, but the time for dreams has now passed. Only nostalgia and longing remain.

Écailles De Lune doesn't recapture Alcest's former glories, but it does reveal their more human side.

Anyone expecting some kind of innovation from Neige can only come away disappointed by Les Voyages De L’Âme, the third full-length on which the French multi-instrumentalist simply carries on weaving the dreamy tapestries he began spinning back in 2005. The same epic melancholy is here, built from layered distortion, and variations on the main theme are almost always entrusted to Winterhalter's drumming. The aggression and screaming of “Là Où Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles” and “Faiseurs De Mondes” are the last remaining traces of the band's metal roots, which this record seems to mark the gradual abandonment of, in favour of ethereal, brooding melodies.

Songs like “Nous Sommes L’Emeraude” or the title track itself are almost dream-pop in disguise, draped in distortion, with simple, honeyed melodies close to Slowdive, whose beauty lies entirely in layers of sound overdubbed one atop the other.

Though sparing on new ideas, Les Voyages De L’Âme is a fine album that definitively confirms Alcest as one of the most compelling names in contemporary shoegaze.

Neige has by now completed the sonic transformation he had set out on, moving ever further from his black metal roots and "purifying" them into a new, ethereal form, abstracted into tones closer to a shoegaze sunlit one. The French artist weaves dreamlike patterns in an increasingly layered way, leading us toward a sense of emptiness, of vacuum emotional that scrapes away the last dead layers of melancholy and epic aggression that characterized his previous record.

A sun seen with wide-open eyes, during a meditative dance or a moment of tragic reflection, Shelter (2014) is a refuge from shadows and complex shapes, a lush green plain bordering a sky just as pure and imperfect. Here the listener can find pleasure in stillness, or draw out its decadence instead. An ambiguous decadence, one that takes shape beneath a cold, perfect light, the natural offspring of the production by Birgir Jón Birgisson, producer of Sigur Ròs, who makes room for a truly intimate, acoustic atmosphere on the pristine “Away”, which features the voice of Neil Halstead of Slowdive. This is a moment of rare poetry, one that ultimately runs up against a surface perhaps too smooth and polished, communicating nothing beyond an idyllic image of protection and balance.

The single “Opale”, like the subsequent “La nuit marce avec moi” and “Voix sereines”, are perfect crystals of reverberated sound, in which light traces swift, precise circular paths between a dawning shoegaze and an entirely rarefied metal spectre, building tall glass towers. It's a shame they remain sterile, mannered exercises, much like the title track or the long, closing “Delivrance”, which boast splendid production and arrangements in the most luminous sense of the term — a shame that beyond that light, no real humanity, no touching poetry, can be found.

Perhaps it's the loss of the more restless, darker side of Neige's music that has stripped it of the allure it once held, and of the emotional force it used to convey. A “perhaps” that by now feels more like a certainty.

In autumn 2016, however, Alcest retrace their steps, and their new release marks a small shift. They keep their bittersweet trademark intact, but return to more electric, distorted sounds. The album is called Kodama, a reference to the spirits said to inhabit trees in Japanese folklore, representing the record's concept of conflict between modern man and nature — a conflict also portrayed in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film “Princess Mononoke”, which Neige cited as a major source of inspiration for the album's themes.

The guitars paint sonic backdrops that sustain the dreamlike atmospheres, made all the more effective by the contrast between melodiousness and distorted guitars, which then give way to placid digressions where delicate sonic counterpoints add extra shine to the tracks.

From the opening title track, the interplay between sweet guitar phrasing, more aggressive riffs and meditative passages reveals an attitude that is ultimately predictable, but one that Alcest are unquestionably masters of on today's scene.

The vocal lines are stripped to the essentials, and it's the "unsaid" that strikes more than the said, to put it à la Saint-Exupéry. The second track, "Eclosion", instead uses them to amplify the band's interplay of contrasts, initially letting sweet guitar phrasing carry forward the "dialogue" with the listener, before bringing in the duet between Kathrine Shepard's tender female vocal musings and Neige's screaming.

"Je suis d'ailleurs" is the most aggressive track of the bunch, with catchy basslines and abrasive guitar melodies that explode in a central section that comes closest to their distant black-metal origins. By contrast, the following "Untouched" and "Oiseaux de proie" amplify the ethereal walls of distortion over which Neige's voice rests, engaged in a visceral, moving crooning, while the drums edge toward almost tribal rhythms that fully embody the theme of nature and the most primitive humanity.

"Onyx", finally, is the darkest track of the whole set, with a cavernous, anguished bass line, and it's also the shortest: just under 4 minutes in which the same motif repeats. The atmosphere generated by this outro is one of pessimism, but also of awareness: an invitation not to lose touch with either nature or humanity, and therefore, perhaps, a positive spur for the listener.

Ultimately, Kodama sounds more cohesive and incisive than its predecessor, with lively, inspired songwriting, but it doesn't add anything new. A welcome confirmation for the band's fans, in any case.

The 2019 incarnation of Alcest manage to stay poised between a new, more accessible direction and some dazzling flashes tied to the most fertile phase of their career. Spiritual Instinct, released on Nuclear Blast, is without doubt their best album in the last seven or eight years, a work that obviously deserves to be appreciated beyond any clearly defined genre, precisely in light of a blend of various influences (post-rock, shoegaze and black metal in nature) that has finally struck the perfect balance. The Frenchmen have finally found their footing again, partly recovering their black-metal roots (Neige's screaming, still alternating with the predominant clean vocals) and a more melancholic, ancestral spirit.

Five long years had to pass before hearing the seventh studio album, titled for the occasion Les Chants De L'Aurore. Neige stays true to his more recent path, yet leans into the project's more dreamlike, oneiric side. The result is a poignant, poetic record, a work of real quality not lacking in genuinely important peaks (the eight minutes of "Améthyste").

Contributions by Michele Guerrini ("Shelter"), Alessandro Mattedi ("Kodama"), Paolo Chemnitz ("Spiritual Instinct" and "Les Chants De L'Aurore")

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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Alcest on OndaRock

Discography

Tristesse Hivernale (Drakkar, 2001)	4
Le Secret (Drakkar, 2005)	6
Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde (Prophecy, 2007)	8
Split Ep (Prophecy, 2009)	7.5
Écailles De Lune (Prophecy, 2010)	7
Les Voyages De L'Âme (Prophecy, 2012)	7
Shelter (Prophecy, 2014)	6
Kodama(Prophecy, 2016)	7
Spiritual Instict (Nuclear Blast, 2019)	8
Les Chants De L'Aurore (Nuclear Blast, 2024)	7