The title track opens the fifth album rather softly, with a moody guitar intro that slowly swells as a voice solemnly ponders over the lamentable state of the world. These clean spoken word vocals are a bit of a curveball, since usually the vocalist delivers grunts from the deepest abyss or anguished screams full of desperation. These seemingly restrained reflections do not last however, as a few minutes later he can no longer hold back the darkness as Jonathan Théry‘s singing descends into utter despair. At this moment the doomed riffs kick in as well in all their monolithic grandeur.

Clocking in at sixteen minutes, this first song is already a world on to its own, with an alpha and an omega to its structure. The record could have stopped here, and it would have been a more than worth the price for this song alone. However, the misery is long from over. ‘Vomisseurs de Vide’, which translates more or less as ‘Vomiters of the void’, starts out equally dismal and apathetic, but a few minutes in this twenty-two plus behemoth will also unsheathe their undying devotion to the death metal of old. The band has never shunned away from losing themselves entirely in these outbursts of deathly fury, juxtaposing it directly with the most morose funereal sections.

‘Glory of Ignominy’ is a classic Ataraxie track, with hammering doom riffs and unhinged screaming. If you’re not so well versed in either this band or the likes of, for instance, Bethlehem, then these type of demented vokills might come as a bit of a shocker amidst the abysmal grunts and whispered declamations. They do, however, exemplify the psychological turmoil of these anguished times. In its full abandon, it invites in more blasts of blind rage against an uncaring society.

It all comes crashing down on the album closer, the aptly named ‘The Collapse’. Under this moniker, riffs are stretched out until the breaking point. Which they finally do, of course, with a thundering noise until all sound dissipates in one lingering note.

Compared to the predecessor, the band’s fifth album sounds like a much more serious affair. This is visualized in the cover as well. Where ‘Résignés’ features the band in a mock-up composition where someone was about to get her head chopped by an executioner, who looked he had just walked off some LARP RPG game, hood, axe and everything.

Compared to the current bleak picture on the cover here, you could almost accuse them of having had fun with the previous one. Now we get a very sober, but poignant black and white snapshot of a melting iceberg, acting as a the symbol of the world collapsing around us.

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