Eight years is a long time in heavy music. Long enough for entire scenes to rise and dissolve, for a band’s absence to become either a source of anticipation or a quiet footnote. Bosse-de-Nage, the San Francisco quartet named after a hallucinated monkey in an Alfred Jarry novel, have spent that time doing what they’ve always done: refusing to operate on anyone’s schedule but their own. Hidden Fires Burn Hottest is their sixth full-length and their first since 2018’s Further Still, and it sounds like a band that used those eight years to figure out exactly how much space they needed.
Where Further Still was built on compression and restraint, this record sprawls. Ten tracks across nearly an hour, including two brief interludes (“With a Shrug” and “Triangular Dream”) that function as pressure valves between the album’s more demanding stretches. The scope is deliberate. Vocalist Bryan Manning has described the approach as “adventure mode,” and the term fits: these songs follow their own logic rather than adhering to a template.
“Where to Now?” opens with a question that doubles as a statement of intent. The track establishes the album’s central tension between explosive black metal passages and sections of genuine restraint, space where the instruments pull back and let the song’s architecture become visible. “Mementos” pushes further into that dynamic, seven minutes that build through patient layering before arriving at something overwhelming. The guitars here carry a weight that feels earned rather than performed.
“In the Name of the Moth” is the album’s most arresting track. It moves through multiple phases without ever feeling like it’s showing off, the transitions arriving with a kind of narrative inevitability. There are moments of genuine strangeness here: jazzy piano, whispered passages, textures that don’t belong in black metal and are better for it. “No Such Place” follows with the record’s longest stretch at over eight minutes, a slow burn that rewards the patience it demands.
The closing track “Leviathan” earns its title. Eight minutes of controlled escalation, the band pulling together every thread the album has laid out and weaving them into something that feels conclusive without feeling neat. It’s the kind of ending that makes you want to start the record again immediately.
Jack Shirley recorded the album at Atomic Garden East, and his approach captures the band’s dynamics with clarity rather than polish. Heavy sections hit with full weight, but the quieter passages retain texture and detail instead of just getting thin. Richard Chowenhill’s mix gives each instrument its own space without separating them into isolation. The vocals sit inside the music rather than on top of it, which is exactly right for songs that treat voice as one element among many.
Standout tracks: In the Name of the Moth, Mementos, Leviathan
For a band that treats conventions as suggestions, Hidden Fires Burn Hottest is the sound of Bosse-de-Nage finally letting the songs take whatever shape they need. The eight-year wait was worth it.
