Alcest

From the beginning, Alcest (despite some line-up rotations at the very start) has been Neige’s solo project and, in his own words, its music has been inspired by his dreams, where he has encountered “a place with colours, forms and sounds non-existent in the real world.” Despite that, during its early days, the project didn’t really sound all that dreamlike. The French ensemble’s first demo tape, Tristesse hivernale, released in 2001, is a pure biting and raw black metal. It was only four years later, with the release of the EP Le Secret, that Alcest entered the world of poetic black metal with shoegaze stem. 

It was a world Neige quickly made his home and wasted no time. In 2007, he debuted with the full-length album Souvenirs d’un autre monde and fans and critics appreciated the marriage of (seemingly) antithetical genres. But Neige has always managed to craft them into a cohesive whole. Since 2009, he is no longer alone, with a drummer, Winterhalter, on board. Alcest (now as a duo) went on to release six more records, with titles such as Les voyages de l’âme and Kodama solidifying the band’s reputation as a completely singular phenomenon of the metal scene. Their latest record, Les chants de l’aurore, released in 2024, only proves that further.