HØLLS is a post-metal band formed in 2023 in Besançon (there really is something happening in that area!) whose debut album, Ill, is self-produced. The title and artwork say it all: the band will talk about mental health and a dehumanised society through the story of a character trying to survive the world around her, her past traumas and an individualistic society that scorns nature. Feverish anxiety and visceral exorcisms are on the menu!
This thematic backdrop is important. It becomes clear very quickly, once the anguished breaths of the introduction have passed: the first trace of a human voice is a heart-rending howl, a desperate attempt to express oneself, to exist, a violent rejection too. Last Deep Breath grabs us by the throat with this flaying, even intimidating cry: if singer Sarah Chatelain rips out her vocal cords and guts in this way, it's to make us understand that here no mystical decorum will adorn the music with frills. At times, you're reminded of the madness that Julie Christmas brings to her wildest outbursts. Even when the band raises the tone, HØLLS is intimate and authentic, and manages to instil a rare spontaneity in a genre where compositions often extend over long periods. As the storm passes and a hypnotic, minimalist melody settles in, you realise that the raw, unadorned sound serves the purpose well. WIth HØLLS, the emphasis is on the outpouring of emotion rather than the grand, ornamental and decorative. We also appreciate how, in the alternation between violence and lulls, HØLLS manages to avoid certain clichés: the atmospheric parts are not systematically synonymous with hope or enlightenment. On the contrary, certain threats seem to lurk in the shadows, and we sometimes flirt with poetically evocative spectral waltzes (Endless Night, with its strong cinematic potential). The raging eruptions then take on a combative air: like the finale of Fall Into Decay, however tormented it may be, the violence here is salvific.
Ill is a liberating album. Despite its oppressive loops, despite its moments of despondency, despite the despair that sometimes oozes from it, each track has its unexpected moment, its contemplative pause or, on the contrary, its cathartic rebel charge. With a solid foundation of compositions that manage, in their false simplicity, to sound organic and natural, HØLLS offer us an eventful journey filled with strong contrasts and carried by a poignant, inhabited vocal, at once icy and disturbing but which also knows how to invite us to its side. With its roughness and its fury, the album has the sincere flavour of a first work in which you give yourself without restrain, a lively and touching energy where you don't cheat, you don't skimp. In the end, it's as radical as it is refreshing.
