Bandcamp Deliverance are a French avant-garde metal project founded in 2013 by Etienne Sarthou (guitar; also of Karras, ex-AqME, Freitot) and Pierre Duneau (vocals and keyboards, ex-Memories of a Dead Man). The Voyager Golden Banquet, released May 22 on Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions (LADLO — the long-running French underground imprint that has built one of the most consistent avant-black/post-metal/sludge catalogues in continental Europe), is the band’s new album and the kind of record that earns the “avant-garde” tag through actual sonic confrontation rather than promotional convenience. Eight tracks across forty-three minutes.
The album’s framing is explicit: “weary of earthly life, Deliverance sets out to explore the farthest reaches of the universe with a new album whose title sounds like an invitation to interstellar travel.” The track titles run “Hellisual”, “Chasing the Dragon”, “Headspace Collapse”, “Turn On Tune In Drop Out”, “As Above So Below”, “Ground Zero”, “The Banquet – part 1”, “The Banquet – part 2”. Half-Leary-quotation, half-cosmic-occult-philosophy, half-bandsplaining what kind of band you’re getting into.
The Genre Cross
The Bandcamp framing names the genre cross directly: “while Deliverance’s black metal/sludge DNA remains intact, it is now confronted with elements of post-rock and progressive rock, Floydian psychedelia, and even contemporary indie rock/electro.” That’s a lot of ingredients for forty-three minutes, and the album works it across the running order rather than blending it into a single sound. “Hellisual” at eight minutes opens the record in tight, aggressive sludge-black mode with dense brick-walled mastering and harsh vocals upfront; “Chasing the Dragon” at four and forty-nine pulls in the electronic/post-metal hybrid mode the band have been building, with synth-textures running alongside the guitar walls.
“Headspace Collapse” at seven and thirteen is the album’s most fully realised dynamic argument — cathedral-spacious passages bracketing brutal eruptions, the kind of wide-room production that requires patience to develop. “Turn On Tune In Drop Out” at eight and six (the album’s longest piece) is where the Floydian psychedelia surfaces most explicitly: a wave-shaped structure with contrasting clean-to-heavy breaks, the kind of long-form patience that the Leary-referencing title earns.
“As Above So Below” is a brief thirty-three-second instrumental interlude, the kind of structural punctuation that LADLO’s catalogue uses well. “Ground Zero” at six and twenty-one returns to the album’s sludge-black mid-section, the closest the band gets to a straight-genre cut. “The Banquet – part 1” at four and fifty-six and “part 2” at two and forty-nine close the album in two-piece form, the second part operating as an electronic-leaning coda rather than a traditional metal closer.
The Production Question
The production sits in dense, contemporary metal-mastering territory across the heaviest tracks — brick-walled compression, sharp transients, harsh vocals dry and forward — and pulls back into proper dynamic restraint on the atmospheric pieces. That production split between the heaviest cuts and the more ambitious dynamic pieces is the album’s main inconsistency, but it’s also a deliberate sequencing choice that lets each genre-cross piece earn its place.
The credentials matter: LADLO are one of the most consistent labels in the European avant-garde metal scene, and The Voyager Golden Banquet fits their roster cleanly. The album’s reservations are honest — the densest sludge-black passages accumulate the standard frequency stacking, the electronic elements occasionally sit slightly isolated from the band-sound, and the brick-walled mastering on the heaviest cuts levels some of the dynamic argument the writing is reaching for. But the album’s strongest material (“Headspace Collapse,” “Turn On Tune In Drop Out”) earns the four stars, and the genre-cross is executed rather than merely promised.
Eight tracks across forty-three minutes, released on Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions. Mix philosophy varies by track in deliberate sequencing: heaviest cuts (“Hellisual,” “Ground Zero”) sit brick-walled and dense with harsh vocals dry-and-forward, sample-leaning drum processing, and frequency stacking in the low-mids; atmospheric pieces (“Headspace Collapse,” “Turn On Tune In Drop Out,” “The Banquet – part 2”) have proper dynamic range and cathedral-reverb spatial decisions; the electronic-leaning hybrid tracks (“Chasing the Dragon,” “The Banquet – part 2”) integrate synth-textures alongside the band-sound with mixed success — sometimes embedded, sometimes slightly isolated. Vocals move between buried-deep-in-the-wall harsh placements and forward-dry harsh placements depending on the track. Mastering loudness is contemporary across the runtime but the dynamic argument on the longer pieces (“Turn On Tune In Drop Out” in particular) has room to develop. The production split between the heaviest brick-walled cuts and the more dynamically-aware atmospheric pieces is the album’s main consistency tension and reads as deliberate sequencing rather than engineering inconsistency.
Standout tracks: Turn On Tune In Drop Out for the eight-minute long-form Floydian-psychedelia piece that earns its title. Headspace Collapse for the seven-and-a-quarter-minute cathedral-spacious dynamic argument. Hellisual for the eight-minute opener’s setting-of-terms aggression.
Recommended without reservation if you appreciate French avant-garde metal that takes the genre-cross seriously and works on a label (LADLO) with the catalogue depth to back the project up. The Voyager Golden Banquet is the kind of fourth-album-ish statement where the band have decided exactly what their identity is and have the production team to execute it.
