Bandcamp Queen(ares) come out of the old mining basin of northern France, and Choices carries that weight in its bones, a cinematic, deeply melancholy post-metal record built by players tied to the French heavy scene of The Lumberjack Feedback and Sylvaine. Across seven tracks and nearly an hour, they work one idea with real conviction: the swing between crushing, claustrophobic walls of sound and vast, near-silent troughs, screamed dread giving way to spoken-word calm and back again.
The dynamic craft is the whole point, and it lands. The record’s structure lives in contrast, and the mastering is smart enough to keep the quiet passages genuinely quiet rather than crushing everything to one level, so the heavy eruptions actually hit. “Darker than before” is the clearest proof, a monolithic assault that suddenly opens into an intimate, dry clean-and-spoken mid-section of unexpected plasticity before the final collapse. “Black corridors” pushes the widest palette, gutturals and hysterical screams and effect-drenched whispers over transient-sharp drums that stay separated even in the density, and “What if the soul remains” rides the leap from filigree clean guitar into a massive wall with the emotion fully intact. This is a band that understands that the heaviness only means something if the silence around it is real.
The one recurring technical knock is the low end. When Queen(ares) go full-density the mix stacks up around 200 to 300 Hz, the fuzzed guitars and a boomy, under-defined bass melting into each other until the heaviest climaxes lose a little transparency and the harsh vocals sink into the wall. It is the price of chasing this much mass, and it never derails the atmosphere, but a cleaner separation in those peaks would have turned a very good record into a crushing one.
Choices is an ambitious, cohesive, emotionally powerful post-metal album that uses its full length instead of just filling it, from the dark-ambient intro to the blackgaze-tinged eruptions of its back half. The scene pedigree shows in the craft, and the willingness to let the quiet do as much work as the heavy marks Queen(ares) as more than another wall-of-sound band. For anyone who likes their post-metal cinematic, patient and genuinely heavy, this is well worth the hour.
Cinematic, emotionally heavy atmospheric post-metal with sludge and blackgaze edges, built on huge quiet-loud swings between crushing claustrophobic walls and vast, near-silent troughs, screamed dread against spoken-word and clean calm. The dynamic craft is the strength: the mastering keeps the quiet passages genuinely quiet rather than crushing everything flat, so the heavy eruptions land, and the best tracks (“Darker than before”, “Black corridors”, “What if the soul remains”) swing between intimate clean mid-sections and massive walls with the emotion intact and the drums staying separated. The one recurring weakness is the low end: at full density the mix stacks up around 200 to 300 Hz, fuzzed guitars and a boomy under-defined bass melting together until the heaviest climaxes lose transparency and the harsh vocals sink in. Ambitious, cohesive and genuinely powerful.
Standout tracks: Darker than before, Black corridors, What if the soul remains
