Review: Solfatare – Asservis par l’espoir
“Asservis par l’espoir” is the debut of Solfatare from Belgium. They take no prisoners, as “Des monarques anhédoniques” make clear from the first second. The bands builds a black metal landscape where hope is a chain, a thorned crown pressing down, not a light to guide by. This debut full-length navigates existential despair with poetry in French, dissonance that gnaws at the edges, and intermittent melodic rays that never fully warm you but cut through the cold.
Musically the album is ambitious. Solfatare draw on second-wave black metal roots, but they toy with avant-garde touches: moments of clean guitar, somber melody, slow build before chaos. Tracks like “D’hommes et d’isoptères” and “Ozymandias” show their knack for pacing, while “Sous des cieux absents” offers a harrowing balance of tension and release. The closing “Quand ton cerveau te surine le crâne” feels like a final gasp: multifaceted, crushing, and atmospheric. The dynamics are mostly well handled, though sometimes the album drags in its middle, when the lyrical despair, musical repetition and layering of distortion slightly overstay their welcome.
Production is spot on: The mix gives room for bass weight, allows drums to batter without flattening everything else, and the vocals cut through with clarity. It’s textured; you can hear the spaces between the riffs, the deliberate dissonant chords, the atmospheric stretches. The album artwork and overall presentation reinforce the mood: bleak, poetic, volcanic. The French lyrics lend a sense of gravitas and make the moments of melody more piercing when they arrive.
But “Asservis par l’espoir” isn’t flawless. Some tracks are perhaps too long for what they offer, and in places, the songwriting lacks a distinctive signature. There are times when you feel you’ve heard variations of this approach before: black metal that swells, collapses inward, breathes despair, lifts up melody. Their voice is powerful, but still partly echoing others.
What makes this album worth hearing is its emotional honesty. It doesn’t sell nihilism as stylish, but wrestles with it, frames it, lets it bleed through poetry and atmospheric tension. For listeners who want black metal that isn’t just bleak noise but tries to argue with its own darkness, Solfatare deliver something potent.
“Asservis par l’espoir” is a debut that burns with promise. It’s heavy, often beautiful, occasionally unwieldy, but those rough edges are part of its character. If Solfatare can sharpen their identity in future, they could really become something more than just another sorrowful voice in the crowd.
