Bandcamp Depressive black metal is a long-form genre. The convention is five or six tracks, eight to twelve minutes each, the length itself doing part of the work. Avant l’aube has twenty tracks in forty-eight minutes. The longest is under four. Most sit around two and a quarter.
That is the first thing worth knowing about this record and it shapes everything else. Profondeurs have been going since 2022 out of Saint-Hyacinthe in Quebec, this is their fifth album since 2023, and somewhere in that run they decided to stop writing long and start writing often.
What the format does
It removes the hiding place. A twelve-minute atmospheric black metal track can spend four minutes arriving and nobody minds. A two-minute one cannot, so each of these has to establish itself, do its thing, and stop. The record moves accordingly: a median of thirteen and a half decibels between the quiet and loud passages of a given track, which is wide, and a spread from five decibels up to nearly thirty-two.
“La Pluie Froide De Novembre” holds that widest figure, and it earns it with a genuine collapse from atmosphere into violence partway through rather than a fade. “Dans Mes Veines” does something similar. “Haine”, the opener proper, does the opposite and sits almost flat, which is why it works as a door into the record rather than a summary of it.
The credits are more interesting than the genre tags suggest. Samuel Paul-Dionne handles voice, guitars, sampling and production, Samuel Bibeau plays drums and bass, Alexis-Charles Lafond is on piano and keys, and Youri Paul-Goulet plays saxophone. A saxophonist on a depressive black metal record is not a thing you see often, and it is credited rather than hidden.
The hinge
The record has two sounds and it swaps between them at a specific point. The first seven songs are bright, with a quarter of their energy up above five kilohertz and very little weight underneath. Everything after track nine is darker and considerably heavier at the bottom, with the treble pulled back.
Track nine is “Sur Le Chemin Du Grand Pré”, listed as an interlude, and it is the darkest thing on the album by an enormous margin: over half its energy sits below two hundred and fifty hertz, almost none of it above five kilohertz. It is not a palate cleanser. It is the point where the record changes its mind, and the second interlude, “Les Marais”, does the same job again further on.
Whether that was planned or discovered afterwards I cannot say. It is clearly there.
So
Recommended, and to people who do not normally get on with this genre as much as to those who do. The brevity is the argument: twenty short pieces give you twenty beginnings, and a style that often asks for endurance here asks only for attention. The reservation is that a few of the two-minute tracks in the second half are variations on the ones before them rather than separate ideas, and at twenty entries that is noticeable. Start at “La Pluie Froide De Novembre”, then go back and hear what the interlude at track nine did to the album around it.
Lyrically it sits in the usual territory for the style. It is sung entirely in French and the titles carry it plainly enough: Haine, La Laideur, Cercle De Souffrance, Dans Mes Veines.
The album splits cleanly in two. Tracks two to eight average a tonal centre of 2978 hertz with 25.3 percent of their energy above five kilohertz and only 15.2 percent below two hundred and fifty. Tracks ten to twenty average 2260 hertz, 19.4 percent treble and 26.3 percent bass. Sitting exactly between them is “Sur Le Chemin Du Grand Pré”, the ninth track, which measures 786 hertz with 52.5 percent of its energy in the bottom band and 3.9 percent above five kilohertz, making it by far the darkest thing on the record. Dynamic range is unusually wide for the genre, a median of 13.4 decibels and a spread from 5.0 on “Haine” to 31.7 on “La Pluie Froide De Novembre”, the latter being the widest single track figure anywhere in our measurement set. Peaks run between 12.6 and 16.0 decibels above average, so nothing has been flattened. Average levels hold between minus 13.9 and minus 17.5 decibels.
Standout tracks: La Pluie Froide De Novembre, Dans Mes Veines, Sur Le Chemin Du Grand Pré
