BRIQUEVILLE are a band built on refusal. No names, no faces, no interviews without the golden masks and black robes. The members, drawn from the jazz, electro, and metal scenes around Temse in East Flanders, have maintained this anonymity since their formation, and at this point it functions less as a gimmick than as a structural principle. The music is the identity. Everything else is noise. IIII, their fourth album on Pelagic Records, continues the project’s central formal device: track numbering that runs continuously across all releases, treating each album not as a fresh start but as the next set of chapters. We’re at Akte XVI through XX now, twenty entries deep into a single unbroken work.
The album opens with “Akte XVI,” which establishes the palette immediately. Low-end drones build into a wall of distortion, the pace is glacial, and the tension comes from the question of when (not whether) the weight will arrive. What distinguishes IIII from its predecessors is the vocal presence. Where earlier records leaned heavily on instrumental texture, this one introduces ethereal melodic lines and something closer to actual singing alongside the expected growls. It’s a subtle but significant shift. The vocals on “Akte XVII” drift between whispered incantation and full-throated heaviness, creating a dynamic that the purely instrumental passages of earlier work couldn’t access.
“Akte XVIII” is the album’s centerpiece, eight minutes of slow structural accumulation. It’s the track where the band’s jazz backgrounds feel most audible, not in any obvious sense, but in the patience of the arrangement, the way instruments enter and exit the mix with the confidence of players who trust silence as much as volume. Brief passages of warmth surface here, almost gentle, before the weight reasserts itself. It’s one of the few moments in BRIQUEVILLE’s catalogue where the music offers something close to comfort before pulling it away.
“Akte XIX” is the shortest track and functions as a transitional passage, a moment of restraint before the album’s final statement. “Akte XX,” at over twelve minutes, is the culmination. It is heavy in the way that the best doom and drone music is heavy: not through speed or aggression but through sustained pressure and the refusal to resolve. The track builds across its runtime without ever hurrying, and when it ends, the silence it leaves feels structural rather than incidental.
The concept, creativity free from the confinement of morals, expectations, and time, could easily become pretentious in lesser hands. BRIQUEVILLE avoid this because the music itself does the work. The anonymity, the continuous numbering, the masks: these are not decoration layered onto ordinary post-metal. They are the framework that allows the music to exist without the usual biographical context that listeners bring to a band’s work. You cannot separate the songs from the singer’s personal life when you don’t know who the singer is.
The production favors density over clarity, which suits the material. The low end is massive without becoming muddy, and the drone elements sustain across passages without losing definition. Guitar tones shift between clean, almost shimmering textures and thick, saturated walls of distortion. The vocal production integrates the new melodic elements smoothly alongside the heavier passages, neither element feeling grafted on. The mix gives everything room to resonate, which is essential for music that operates at this pace.
Standout tracks: Akte XVIII, Akte XX, Akte XVII
IIII is the work of a band twenty chapters into a story they clearly intend to keep telling. It doesn’t reinvent BRIQUEVILLE’s approach, but the expanded vocal palette and the moments of unexpected warmth suggest a project that is still finding new territory within its own framework. Four albums in, the masks still fit.
