I don’t know that I like black metal much. Aside from it being a genre with its fair share of skeletons in all sorts of dubious closets, demanding intensive research before I even press play, the effect tends to flatten out for me. It’s not that the music itself is uninteresting, it’s how the emotional register barely moves once it’s established. For a genre that asks for that much upfront, the payoff feels thin. High risk, debatable reward. What I do like is black metal put under tension, stretched thin until its bare bones are at risk of breaking, then released to snap back and catch you somewhere you weren’t braced for. This is what Mourir do, and they’ve been perfecting their elastic take on the genre for three albums. Behind Nous, Le Venin stand members and former members of Toulouse’s crème de la crème Plebeian Grandstand, Drawers, Vermine, and Bruit ≤; it’s been produced and engineered by Amaury Sauve, who’s spent time in similarly vitriolic sonic territory with the likes of Birds in Row and Sorcerer, and knows exactly what to do with a band that’s trying to rip you apart at the seams.
Right off the bat, Nous, Le Venin is dense but it doesn’t tip into oppression, and that distinction is probably the most useful thing I can write about it. It demands the kind of focus the best art always demands, but the dread that’a usually married with this genre has been masterfully siphoned out and replaced with something akin to catharsis. For taxonomy’s sake, let’s call what Mourir do dissoblack, although over several listens I feel they have kept its form and discarded the doctrine and ideology. The pacing owes more to post-metal than to anything black, patient and willing to let a passage swell, until tension accumulates and breaks into feral blast beats. Every now and then, the record wrenches direction into something even darker and more liturgical, closer to being hurled against cold, damp stone, and being abandoned there. These are its best and cruellest moments because you can never see the turn coming until you’re already inside it. Mourir stage these moments in an almost cinematic way.
Black metal DNA stays legible in the drums while guitars answer to something else entirely, melodic instead of abrasive, rhythmic on ‘Mon rêve animal’, shimmering close to post-rock on ‘Je est absent’, a track that abandons its own violence halfway through for something gentler, almost jazz inflected and briefly Lynchian before a mid-song break plays out like staged theatre, a bit avantgarde in its nerve. The guitars, not the drums, tend to do a lot of the atmospheric heavy lifting throughout, and that inversion is most of what makes Nous, Le Venin feel like black metal is being reauthored without losing its teeth in the process. A low drone runs beneath most tracks, giving it all an oddly urban, brutalist cast. Exhales and pauses are deliberately built into an album that tends to accumulate, and it all becomes immersive to the point of no escape. Even so, each instrument stays legible without tipping into sterility. At its most demanding, this is a record that rewards its listeners with room to breathe.
There’s a dichotomy stitched through it, with vocals against everything that surrounds them: anguished howls and shrieks are set alongside instrumentation that keeps finding light inside its own shadows. Brutish and genuinely hungry to tear you apart in places, and yet the ending on its last track, ‘Nous, Le Venin’ arrives uplifting rather than, which I am unsure was ever the intention. Hope and despair often refuse to resolve into either side of the coin, and it’s this careful balancing act that made me return and press play again and again. Mourir don’t overstay their welcome, but they call for a level of commitment albums in this vein rarely earn from me. This one did, snapping back and stinging exactly as much as I needed it to.
