Bandcamp The cover art tells you what you are getting into: pure black metal kitsch, unapologetic and unironic. Chute-Libre, the second album from Marie’s solo project Vertige (alias Brouillard), delivers accordingly. Eight tracks, sixty-eight minutes, all in French, the guitars drenched in gain, bass and drums kept lean underneath. The production is not trying to be modern and does not need to be. This is old-school atmospheric black metal as artistic expression first and sonic engineering second.
The track titles map a descent. “Je glisse” — I slip. “Alienation.” “Du rouge sur le blanc” — red on white. “Desaturation.” “Plus jamais!” — never again. “J’ecris ton nom” — I write your name. “Ballade.” “Le vide trouve un chemin” — the void finds a way. The trajectory is deliberate, and the music follows it with a patience that the runtime demands. The tempo sits mid-paced, the tremolo guitars dominant and saturated, the vocals shifting between mumbling, declaiming, howling, and chanting. Marie does not settle into a single register and the record benefits from it.
“Du rouge sur le blanc” is the album’s peak at twelve minutes. The opening half is combative, the guitars and blast beats locked in relentless forward motion. Then the closing section dissolves into something tranquil and resigned, the aggression draining out like blood from the title’s image. It is the most moving passage on the record, the point where the old-school framework opens up into something genuinely vulnerable.
What sets Chute-Libre apart from genre exercises is the willingness to break form. Horn, violin, piano, and banjo surface across the tracklist in places where the template calls for more tremolo. “Ballade” drops the black metal entirely for a shorter, natural-sounding piece that sticks out like a clean shirt at a house show. It should not work in context, but it does, precisely because the record around it is so committed to its own density that the contrast creates relief rather than whiplash.
“J’ecris ton nom” adapts Paul Eluard’s poem “Liberte,” writing the name of freedom on every surface as an act of desperate repetition. The track carries that quality of insistence, the same phrase turned over and over until it becomes prayer or compulsion or both. “Desaturation” parallels Orelsan’s social critique filtered through a bleaker lens. The French language is not decoration here. It is the medium through which themes of self-doubt, alienation, and internal conflict reach their most unfiltered expression.
“Le vide trouve un chemin” closes the record with ten minutes that bring the arc to its conclusion. The void finds a way. Not victory, not defeat. Just persistence.
The production leans hard into the old-school black metal aesthetic. The guitars are dominant, saturated with gain, occupying most of the spectral energy in the mid-range. Bass and drums are kept slim underneath, giving the mix a top-heavy, guitar-forward character. The raw distortion is dense and textured, with high harmonic complexity from the layered tremolo work. “Ballade” breaks from this entirely with a natural, unprocessed sound that highlights how constructed the rest of the album is. The vocals sit in the mix rather than on top of it, present but not isolated. The overall loudness is pushed, and the frequency balance prioritizes the guitar wall over low-end weight. It is a production choice that serves the artistic vision more than it serves the listener’s subwoofer.
Standout tracks: “Du rouge sur le blanc” for the twelve minutes that move from violence to resignation and contain the album’s most emotionally exposed moment. “J’ecris ton nom” for the Eluard adaptation and the desperate insistence that drives it. “Ballade” because the decision to strip everything back for five minutes takes more confidence than another blast beat section would have.
Chute-Libre is not a record that will convert anyone who finds old-school black metal production unlistenable. The gain is high, the mix is guitar-dominant, and the aesthetic choices are firmly in the tradition. But within that tradition, Marie has built something that uses the form to say something specific and personal about freefall, alienation, and the stubborn act of writing your name on things that will not last. The kitsch is real. So is the pain underneath it.
