Inborn Suffering marks its rebirth with this new album.
Having lived in the world of underground doom between 2002 and 2012, the band is back in the news in 2022 with the reissue of its debut album, and again in 2023 with a new track. In early 2025, Laurent Chaulet (vocals/guitar, Mourning Dawn, SILT, ex-Funeralium), Emmanuel Ribeiro (bass), Stéphane Peudupin (guitar, Fractal Gates, ex-Lethian Dreams) and Thomas Rugolino (drums, Abjvration, ex-Funeralium, ex-Mourning Dawn) unveil Pale Grey Monochrome in collaboration with Ardua Music, and entrusted to the mix/mastering of Déhà.
The album begins in an eerie quietude with the short Wounding, a ponderous introduction where keyboards carry us through to From Lowering Tides, a first composition that immediately reveals its melancholic dissonance. Leads and harmonics complemented by ex-vocalist/guitarist Loïc Courtete (ex-Bran Barr, ex-Heol Telwen, live for Nydvind) mesmerize us as the thick vocal parts plunge us into darkness, but a few steamier passages allow us to timidly poke our heads out of the swamp before plunging back in to finally join Pale Grey Monochrome, the eponymous composition. As its name suggests, the track is relatively apathetic, slow and above all very calm, very morose, easily establishing its oppression and despair borrowed from Funeral Doom while developing its melodies with a heady touch before meeting Tales from an Empty Shell. The opening moments are very refined, but the cries of despair in the background ignite all at once, offering this suffocating heaviness in ever darker and more hypnotic waves, combining jerky rhythmics and intense vocal parts. A final lull throws us into the final moments of darkness, before we discover Of Loss and Despair, which couples its tranquility with a vocal sample that acts as a welcome interlude, but visibly intensifies before letting The Oak crush us in turn, welcoming their former vocalist Frédéric Simon (Lying Figures) to complete the vocal fury already in place. The track is decidedly more majestic, with the two voices complementing each other as much in despair as in raw power, answering each other and allowing us to move forward through the fog until we reach Drawing Circles, a track where the musicians welcome their former comrade Mathilde Depernet (Profundae Libidines, À Sa Perte, ex-Tales of Blood) on bass for a final dance in agony, sadness and above all an outpouring of emotions, each more negative than the last.
If you don’t know Inborn Suffering yet, imagine a mix of Doom/Death and Funeral Doom with palpable depression. Pale Grey Monochrome is a veritable jewel of dark, visceral melancholy that can’t fail to touch you to the core.
95/100