Bandcamp Endless Floods are a Bordeaux post-heavy trio working a particular intersection between doomgaze, post-rock, dark folk and progressive doom that the French underground has been refining since the band’s formation. PASSAGES, released May 22 across Permafrost Records, Araki Records and Yoyodyne Records (a triple-label co-release indicating real underground network involvement), is the band’s sixth full-length and the kind of record that uses long-form patience as expressive resource. Four tracks: VISIONS at nine and fifty-eight, DEUXIÈME MONDE at seven and fifty, LIMINAL at ten and twenty-four, PRIMORDIAL at nine and twenty-nine.
The lineup is the trio’s standing shape: Louise Dehaye on vocals and saxophone, Benjamin Sablon on drums/synths/electric and acoustic guitars/vocals/percussion, Stéphane Miollan on bass/guitars/vocals/synths. Three musicians, eight instrument slots between them. Recorded by Thibault Laisney and Stéphane Miollan, mixed by Miollan, mastered by Ben Jones. One-hundred-vinyl pressing — the kind of run that signals underground commitment rather than commercial ambition.
Four Pieces of Extreme Contrast
The album’s structural commitment is the long-form piece, every track stretches past seven and a half minutes, the longest past ten. That’s a deliberate decision and one that places the album in the patient-dynamic post-metal lineage where duration is itself expressive — Mütterlein, Year of No Light, Aluk Todolo, Cult of Luna’s quieter moments all earn comparison points without quite matching PASSAGES specifically.
“VISIONS” opens the album at almost ten minutes with the album’s most jarring dynamic contrast: a deliberately overdriven dense fuzz wall pulled apart by an intimate acoustic mid-section, with Louise Dehaye’s clean melancholic vocals placed close-mic and dry in the centre of the mix. The structural argument is the band’s entire vocabulary in compressed form — atmospheric break against textural overload, clean intimacy against fuzz oblivion.
“DEUXIÈME MONDE” at seven and fifty pulls the album’s most cohesive long-form construction together. “LIMINAL” at ten and twenty-four (the album’s longest piece) is the most ambient-leaning cut on the record — a band-of-three sound where the guitars carry textural drone, the bass holds patient foundation, and Dehaye’s vocals (mixing clean and harsh-screamed registers) sit deep in the cathedral-reverb mix as additional atmospheric layer rather than positioned lead.
“PRIMORDIAL” closes the album at nine and twenty-nine. The opening half features Dehaye’s French clean vocals dry and intimate over deep sub-bass and synth pads, the second half collapses into the album’s most fully realised fuzz-wall climax. The Floydian-ambient-into-doom-eruption trajectory across the closer is the album’s strongest single argument for the project’s continued evolution after five prior records.
The Production Frame
The production decisions across the four tracks share a coherent philosophy: extreme dynamic contrast between intimate acoustic/clean passages and densely overdriven walls, with deliberate Lo-Fi commitment in the heaviest moments. The acoustic passages on “VISIONS” and the opening of “PRIMORDIAL” have proper close-mic intimacy; Dehaye’s vocals sit forward and dry with excellent intelligibility on the clean sections, embedded deeper as atmospheric layer on the heavier ones; the saxophone (where it surfaces) adds a distinctive textural element that the band’s three-piece-with-extended-instrumentation approach makes possible.
The cost of the philosophy is the genre’s standing one. The dense fuzz walls accumulate frequency stacking in the low-mids; the snare and kick lose definition under the bass on the heaviest passages; cymbals push toward harshness in the brick-walled climaxes. The mastering by Ben Jones manages the dynamic-range argument cleanly — the quiet passages keep their spatial depth, the loud passages keep their oppressive weight, and the structural ruptures between them register clearly. That’s the production discipline that makes the album work.
Four tracks across thirty-seven minutes, recorded by Thibault Laisney and Stéphane Miollan, mixed by Miollan, mastered by Ben Jones. Mix philosophy is extreme dynamic contrast across the runtime: intimate acoustic passages with close-mic vocals dry and dominant centre-stage, fuzz wall sections deliberately overdriven with bass and guitars fused into single textural mass, drums room-mic’d with limited transient definition on the heaviest passages but proper kick attack on the cleaner ones. Dehaye’s vocals (predominantly clean, with harsh-screamed passages on the heavier sections) move between centred-and-forward dry placement and deep-in-the-wall atmospheric embedding depending on the section. Saxophone surfaces as distinctive textural element on selected passages. Bass functions as articulate sub-foundation on the cleaner passages and fuses with guitars on the densest. Ben Jones’s mastering preserves the dynamic-range argument across all four pieces — the quiet sections keep spatial depth, the loud sections keep oppressive weight, the structural ruptures between them register without flattening. The Lo-Fi commitment on the heaviest passages is deliberate aesthetic decision rather than engineering failure.
Standout tracks: PRIMORDIAL for the nine-and-a-half-minute closer’s intimate-French-vocal-into-fuzz-wall trajectory. VISIONS for the album’s setting-of-terms extreme-contrast vocabulary. LIMINAL for the ten-and-twenty-four-minute long-form ambient-doom construction.
Recommended without reservation if you live in the French post-heavy underground and appreciate sixth-album-veteran bands that commit to long-form patience, extreme dynamic contrast, and the kind of three-musicians-with-eight-instruments approach that PASSAGES makes its identity. The triple-label co-release (Permafrost / Araki / Yoyodyne) is the right context for an album that doesn’t try to chase mainstream post-metal recognition — it’s the work of a project that has decided what the band wants to be after six records of refinement.
