Bandcamp Pilori come out of the Rouen crust scene swinging, and Sans Adieu is exactly the kind of record that scene produces at its best: angry, anti-authority, sung entirely in French, with a title track that is not even a song but a hollow industrial drone. The Normandy band weld blackened crust to hardcore and a streak of raw death metal, and the surprise is how far they push past the genre’s usual borders before the album is done.
The relentlessness is the obvious double edge. Most of Sans Adieu is mastered as a loud, dry, mid-forward wall, the harsh shouts parked right up front and intelligible, the riffs hammering with no real rest. For crust and hardcore that abrasive constancy is part of the deal, and Pilori commit to it fully. The cost is that the middle stretch, the more deathcore-leaning “À Pierre Fendre,” “Le Couteau par la Lame” and “Chiendent,” starts to blur into one fatiguing peak-level slab, the brickwall limiting flattening the drops until they stop landing. Across ten tracks the lack of dynamic relief is the record’s real weakness, not the aggression itself.
What saves it is the band’s refusal to stay in one lane. “Chaos Rampant” caves out of its assault into a long feedback drone, “La Présence des Absents” and “Avant que le Vent ne se Lève” drift into genuinely atmospheric post-black and sludge-doom territory, and the closer “La Rose et L’épine” is the sharpest thing here, a Gothenburg-style melodic-death rush where the separation finally cuts clean and the breaks actually breathe. Most daring of all is “Volontaire,” a warped industrial take on Alain Bashung that swings from clinical, spoken-word minimalism into a saturated wall, the one track where the dynamic extremes are the whole idea. A band this willing to detour through dark ambient and chanson on a crust record is a band worth watching.
Sans Adieu is a committed, varied, genuinely ambitious blackened-crust album that hits hardest in focused bursts rather than across its full length. The production fatigue and the one-dimensional mid-section keep it from the top tier, but the range on display, and the quality of the moments where Pilori let the wall drop, mark them as more than another angry hardcore band. For anyone who likes their crust with an experimental streak, there is a lot here to chew on.
Blackened crust and hardcore with a raw death-metal streak, sung in French, mastered as a loud, dry, mid-forward wall with intelligible up-front shouts. The relentless brickwall loudness is partly the genre aesthetic, but across ten tracks the lack of dynamic relief becomes the main weakness: the deathcore-leaning mid-section (“À Pierre Fendre”, “Le Couteau par la Lame”, “Chiendent”) blurs into a fatiguing peak-level slab with the drops flattened, and the low mids stack up and muddy the riffs. The saving grace is range: tracks collapse into feedback drone, atmospheric post-black and sludge-doom, the title track is a hollow industrial ambient piece, “Volontaire” is a warped Bashung cover built on dynamic extremes, and the closer “La Rose et L’épine” finally cuts clean with sharp separation and breathing breaks. Hits hardest in bursts.
Standout tracks: La Rose et L’épine, Chaos Rampant, Volontaire (Alain Bashung)
