There is an old lake that no longer exists. Lake Tauca filled the Bolivian altiplano during the last ice age and left behind nothing but salt flats and the idea of itself. Montpellier’s Hypno5e have been writing music about it for years, not literally, but spiritually, as a metaphor for something that was vast and then wasn’t. Sheol, their sixth studio album, is the prequel to their 2018 record A Distant (Dark) Source. It tells the story of what came before the night that album described, and in the Hebrew tradition, Sheol is where souls go after death: a place of silence, of dust returning to dust. The concept sounds heavy in summary. The music carries it without strain.
The album opens with “Sheol - Part I - Nowhere,” a two-and-a-half-minute invocation, high, eerie guitar leads over an almost ambient stillness, and then “Sheol - Part II - Lands of Haze” arrives at ten minutes and opens the record properly. The riff that anchors it is massive but not blunt; it arrives slowly, preceded by clean, almost pastoral fingerpicking, and when the weight finally drops it feels earned. The string trio Hypno5e brought in for this album appears here for the first time, threading through the mid-section with an arrangement that sounds less like orchestration bolted on top of metal and more like something the song grew around.
“Bone Dust” is the most angular track on the record, nearly nine and a half minutes of shifting rhythmic emphasis, the kind of song that feels physically disorienting in the best way. New drummer Pierre Rettien and bassist Charles Villanueva make their presence felt here most clearly; the rhythm section plays like a unit that genuinely enjoys complicating things. “Tauca - Part I - Another” follows as a shorter, more direct piece, a moment of relative clarity before the album’s second half.
“Lava from the Sky” is the record’s emotional centre and its most immediate track. At eight minutes it moves more than it broods, and the sung melody that runs through it is warm in a way that Hypno5e’s music doesn’t always allow itself to be. The poets who appear across the album, readers of César Vallejo, Jean Cocteau, Anne Sexton, are woven in at points throughout, their voices low in the mix, more texture than statement, which is exactly the right call. When Emmanuel Jessua sings over them, the effect is of layered time, different kinds of language existing in the same space.
“The Dreamer and his Dream” is the centrepiece by length, nearly thirteen minutes, and the one that demands the most from the listener. It builds in three distinct sections that each feel complete on their own before connecting. The finale, when it arrives, is genuinely overwhelming, the strings, the guitar, the rhythm section all converging into something that feels earned in a way that only works when a band has set it up across an hour.
The closing pair of “Slow Steams of Darkness” tracks, a two-minute interlude followed by a twelve-minute closer, wind the album down with as much intention as it was opened. “Solar Mist” ends not in collapse but in something closer to stillness, the music retreating into the same ambient quiet it emerged from at the start.
Sheol is the record Hypno5e have been building toward. It is warmer and more assured than anything before it, and the new members brought in fresh ideas without disturbing what made the band distinctive. Whether you know the mythology or come to it cold, the music explains itself.
Standout tracks: Lava from the Sky, The Dreamer and his Dream, Bone Dust
