There is something almost classical about the structure of Insolence, the four-track EP that Mourir, the Toulouse-based quartet, released in January 2025. The opening track is called “Hubris.” The closing track of the middle section is called “Nemesis.” The logic is ancient Greek and completely deliberate: pride swells, consequence follows, and the music underneath maps exactly that trajectory, slow and inexorable.
“Hubris” opens the record and does not hurry. Olivier Lolmède’s guitar grinds against Alexandre Bérenguer’s in a way that feels less like two players and more like one sustained, distorted pressure. The riff at the core of the song is not complex, it is the kind of thing that reveals its full shape only on a second or third listen, once you stop waiting for something to happen and accept that what is already happening is the point. Lolmède sings in French, la folie, la foi, en babylone, and the language gives the vocals a texture that English would not, something harder and more clipped, fitting for lyrics about madness and faith dissolving into one another. By the time “Hubris” resolves, just past the five-minute mark, it has laid out the EP’s entire emotional territory.
“Punitive” arrives next and lasts barely two minutes, the tightest, most direct thing Mourir have put on record. It functions almost as a reset, a moment to catch breath before the record’s centrepiece. That centrepiece is “Nemesis,” and at seven minutes it earns the space it takes. The song opens with the same kind of slow-building pressure as “Hubris,” but there is more dissonance here, the guitars pulling against each other in ways that do not quite resolve. The lyrics, trop vite, trop loin, trop fort, trop près, read like a litany of excess, and the music feels the same way: too much, deliberately, until the accumulated weight becomes its own argument. When the tempo briefly shifts past the midpoint, it does not feel like a release so much as a reckoning.
“Illusions” closes the EP, and it arrives from a different source, written by Clément Libes, who also mixed and produced the record, rather than by Lolmède. The shift is subtle but present. The song carries itself with a slightly different weight, a little more spacious in the arrangement, and it functions as an exhale after “Nemesis” raised the temperature as high as it could go. Six and a half minutes of gradual unwinding, without ever fully releasing tension.
The production is worth noting. Libes recorded the band live at Capitole Studio in Toulouse and then mixed at his own space, La Tanière, and the result sounds exactly like a band playing together in a room, not polished into smoothness, but not deliberately raw for the sake of atmosphere either. The drums have real presence without overwhelming the guitars. The bass sits where you can feel it. The whole thing was mastered by Thibault Chaumont at Deviant Lab, and the low end across all four tracks has the kind of density that makes headphones the right choice.
Twenty-one minutes is not long. But Insolence does not feel brief, it feels precise, a band cutting away everything that does not serve the argument they are making. Mourir know where they are going. The EP just makes you feel the journey.
Standout tracks: Hubris, Nemesis
