Alcest - Les chants de l'aurore (2024)

As one of the most awaited releases of 2024, “Les chants de l'aurore” sees Alcest reaching new heights with their seventh full-length release. With a five year gap since their last release, Neige and Winterhalter are back with seven highly dreamy and engaging songs, clocking in at nearly 45 minutes of music. The band’s sound continues to be refined, keeping their core ‘ethereal’ dreaminess, but it also explores new textures and elements, creating an even more immersive and surreal experience.

Opening with “Komorebi” sets a very magical and ethereal stage with lush guitars alongside crafty atmospherics and masterful drumming. Neige’s clean vocals quickly set the mood and this track has very nice tempo changes with some excellent melodic passages and crescendos, creating a very traditional Alcest-like vibe. This brilliantly continues on pieces like “L'envol” and “Améthyste”, where the Blackgaze atmosphere nicely blends with more Post-Rock-style moments.

The balance between clean and harsh vocals is pretty well crafted, keeping things both heavy and dreamy as the album progresses. There are no drastic changes like on “Shelter”, but some of those elements seem to bleed more into songs like “Flamme Jumelle” and our favorite “L'enfant de la lune”, which has some nice electronics and female vocals incorporated at the beginning, including some excellent jazzy interludes to further expand the band’s range.

Closing with the heartfelt “L'adieu”, this release comes full cycle, with a dreamy goodbye. As a whole, “Les chants de l'aurore” is an excellent release that shows Alcest further refining their sound and masterfully incorporating elements from all their previous releases. We particularly enjoyed the balance between lush atmospherics and cathartic moments of blistering guitars and drumming, perfectly blended between Shoegazey passages. This is definitely one of the most polished and ethereal releases of 2024.

Label: Nuclear Blast

Release: June 21st, 2024

Genre: Blackgaze

Country: France