Derriére Nous La Lumiere or in English, “Behind Us, The Light” is the latest from French black metallers Throane. A truly demented release, this is the kind of album that cultivates horrifying soundscapes and uses harsh distortion and ambient moments in conjunction with brutal blasts to create a soundworld that you can only want to claw yourself out of. Yet with every attempt to escape from the pit, you find yourself pulled in even deeper. Derriére Nous La Lumiere is a crash course in black metal in the modern context with all of its brooding, ethereal magic and twisted inhuman dedication to suffering. Few records can invoke a sense of pure evil as well as Throane do here. This is an album that demands to be turned up all the way, simply so that you can revel in the twisted burning wreckage. If you're not here to suffer with us in the darkest of nights and most forsaken mornings, then you might as well leave the hall.
The thing that gets me about Derriére Nous La Lumiere is the sheer breadth of the compositions. Upon multiple listens it becomes clear that the band slaved over every last bit of distortion and refined every vocal passage to fully reflect the darkness meant to be communicated here. And every minute that you delve further into the darkness is another minute that you are forced to drink from the unsacred grail. Derriére Nous La Lumiere finds its strength in the way that it flows from peak to peak, the ambient moments are a mere counterpoint to the aural holocaust that this band revels in. You get lost in the crush of the sound, and the louder you turn it up the easier it is to truly understand what is being done here. I love albums like this because they encourage you to just chill out and spend an evening with the music, spinning it again and again trying to truly understand the nightmare painted by the band.
Throane are creating high art here; it builds on the tradition of other Debemur Mori bands and the whole black metal avant garde that has so quickly garnered the love of the hipster art world. Yet Throane are not hipsters. In fact these guys are unimaginably tortured. I couldn't see where they are going to try and move from here, simply because this is a band who write their own rules. Maybe I'm still lost in my love affair with avant garde black metal, but I think Throane are onto something here. Sure it's super cerebral and pretty much entirely inaccessible for anyone who isn't all about this kind of music but that's part of the point. To create something intensely personal, building on the romantic tradition of folks like Schumann. In the bands powerful song structures and mind melting compositions there is no sense of hope, or even peace. You find that with Derriére Nous La Lumiere, Throane prove that no matter what, there is no end to the fount of human suffering found within every single one of us.
