Aluk Todolo don’t explain themselves. The French trio — guitarist Shantidas Riedacker, bassist Matthieu Canaguier, drummer Antoine Hadjioannou — have been operating at the intersection of occult rock, krautrock, and black metal since forming in Grenoble in 2004, releasing albums with increasing gaps between them and letting the music carry whatever meaning it carries. LUX, their first record since 2016’s Voix, arrives on NoEvDia after eight years of near-total silence. The track titles are rendered in Morse code. There are no vocals. The album was recorded entirely to analog tape at Kerwax Studios in Brittany over two days in July 2023. If you need a mission statement, you won’t get one. If you need the music to speak for itself, it does.
The opener — rendered as ●●• in the tracklist — sets the template in under four minutes. A motorik pulse locks into place, guitar lines spiral above it in repetitive figures that shift so gradually you don’t notice the landscape changing until you’re somewhere else entirely. It’s the shortest track here, and it functions as a threshold: step through, adjust your sense of time, leave the rest behind.
The second track stretches past nine minutes and represents the album at its most expansive. The drums maintain a hypnotic constancy while the guitar moves between clean, shimmering arpeggios and distorted passages that recall early Tangerine Dream filtered through a blackened sensibility. There’s no build-drop-build structure, no climax engineered for release. The piece simply moves, accumulating density and then shedding it, like a breathing organism. The bass, often the unsung anchor in this band’s work, provides a low-end warmth that keeps the more abrasive guitar tones from floating into abstraction.
Tracks three and four operate as a pair, each around six minutes, each exploring a different weight class. The third pushes toward something approaching aggression — the drumming tightens, the guitar tone thickens, and there are moments where the krautrock pulse threatens to become a blast beat before pulling back. The fourth strips things down to their essentials: bass and drums locking into a groove while the guitar traces long, sustained tones above them. It’s the closest LUX comes to ambience, and it earns the stillness by placing it after the most turbulent passage on the record.
The fifth track is the album’s darkest corner. The tempo drops, the guitar feedback becomes a texture rather than an accident, and the whole thing feels like it’s being played in a room that’s slowly filling with smoke. At six and a half minutes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it lingers in the mind. The closer mirrors the opener’s brevity of purpose but extends it — another six-plus minutes of circular, meditative playing that gradually introduces dissonance until the final moments dissolve into static and silence.
The all-analog recording at Kerwax — no digital conversion at any point in the chain — gives LUX a warmth and physical presence that sets it apart from their earlier work. The tape saturation rounds off harsh frequencies naturally, lending the distorted guitar passages a density that feels organic rather than processed. The drums have a beautifully natural room sound — you can hear the space around the kit, the decay of cymbals left to ring. Canaguier’s bass tone is full and defined without competing with Riedacker’s guitar frequencies. The stereo field is wide but not artificially so; instruments occupy positions that feel like three musicians in a room, because that’s exactly what it is.
Standout tracks: ••●●••••●●•●● (Track 2), ●●•●●•• (Track 3), ••● (Track 6)
The coded titles are not a gimmick. They encode something, just not language. Invert the symbols of track one and you get track six. Tracks two and five share identical length and symbol distribution. Three and four mirror each other at the album’s centre. The structure is a palindrome — the record folds in on itself, the second half reflecting the first. For a band invoking sacred geometry in their press materials, the pattern makes more sense than any hidden word ever could: the message is the symmetry.
LUX means light, a deliberate mirror to 2009’s Finsternis (darkness), and there’s something appropriate about an album built on reflections choosing illumination as its name. The band name itself — “the way of the ancestors,” from a pre-Christian animistic tradition in Sulawesi — tells you where their compass points. Aluk Todolo have returned after eight years with a record that sounds like they never left, or more accurately, like they’ve been playing this music continuously in a sealed room and simply decided to open the door. The light that enters is harsh and beautiful and entirely on their terms.
