Néfastes comes to spit its hatred.
The band is born in 2020, cursed year for live music, from the collaboration between Julien Truchan (vocals, Benighted), Liem N’Guyen (guitar, ex-Benighted) and Olivier Gabriel (bass, ex-Benighted). The band releases Scumanity, its first album, with Source Atone Records.
We quickly start with Progéniture Décadente, a song with ultra-fast riffs and overflowing hatred. In this song, everything is made to increase rage inside of us, whatever it is screamed lyrics, pure violence or the ambience, then we go to Fuck With The Bull, You Get The Horn, which seems to be built on the same template of fury and coldness. Once again, the whole band is ready to offer a shrilling sound, especially on vocals, but riffs are not sleeping with those more Old School and weighing parts, while Make Apocalypse Great Again offers a moment of quietness before release chaos under an oppressive and cold shape that picks into the style’s roots. A rope swings to announce the coming of Supplice, a suffocating and sharp song that vomits dissonant riffs and possessed howlings.
The crowd chants its rage for the coming of Scumanity, a more airy composition that however doesn’t hide its attraction for violence and angry parts before coming back into a darker ambience to welcome Charognards, an instrumental melancholic and gloomy track. Whether a keyboard begins the song, guitar, bass and drums will also join this soundtrack of apocalypse and void that surges upon the world. Fire crackles give birth to Ashes Return and its visceral violence. But this unholy energy will be contrasted by more airy and dissonant riffs, before bursting into fire again to die on Carved Into The Flesh, the last song. Riffs are more melodic, offering a mystical energy to this endless violence that only ends with the last seconds of this unholy track.
Néfastes picks into the buried roots of blackness to forge its own sound. In less than thirty minutes, Scumanity vomits its rage and its cold beauty in the face before letting us drown inside. An impending classic.
95/100
