French Music I Like

I confess that I grew up with a few stereotypes about the French. And as an adult, my few interactions with French people have not done very much to dispel them. So I’m as surprised as anyone to discover just how many French bands I love – especially because most of them play metal, and all of them are heavy. Here is some French music I like.

Gojira

Gojira was the first French band I loved, and is still one of my favorites. They’ve never put out a bad album, and they’ve killed it at every live show I’ve seen. I liked them when they eschewed melody completely and used rock instruments to play industrial music. I liked them when they added melodies to absolutely stomping riffs. And I’m sure I’ll like whatever they do next. I could easily drop any of their albums in here for a sample, but I’ll use From Mars to Sirius because it’s on Bandcamp and Sirius is my cat’s name.

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Blut Aus Nord

Blut Aus Nord was the second French metal act I really got into, and one of the first black metal bands I could stomach. I liked the more dissonant stuff I first heard. These “theoricians of insane aestheticism” arrange the sonic ingredients of black metal into dynamic, engaging songs that make me forget I’m listening to black metal. Now, on Hallucinogen, they venture even further into hook-laden, melodic territory and I am so there for it.

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Les Chants Du Hasard

Honestly, I’m not sure what to call Les Chants Du Hasard. Their music is entirely symphonic. There are no rock instruments at all, but there are some Nightwishy circus themes. Like so many black metal projects, there is very little information on their Bandcamp page. So I’m not sure if there’s an actual orchestra or if it’s one guy with good software. The vocals include big operatic choruses that sometimes veer into metal screams. Since I don’t speak French, I can’t tell if there is a story, but the title Livre Second implies that there is. If so, Livre Second conforms as closely to opera conventions as it does to metal (that is, sort of but not quite). Like the best of both of those things, it’s bombastic and loud with a strong sense of drama and majesty. So I like it.

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Lying Figures

If the stereo is on in my living room, there’s a good chance it’s playing doom. So of course, there would be some doomy metal in this list. Lying Figures keeps up a midtempo pace that’s practically a gallop in doom circles, but extreme slowness is not what draws me to doom. Instead it’s oppressive atmospheres, cavernous vocals, meandering structures, and a tone somewhere between death and post-metal. All of which are abundant on The abstract escape.

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DDENT

This instrumental French band is tagged with a post- and nearly every heavy genre I listen to. Like Earth, DDENT is heavy music that I can work to. But where I use Earth to dive deep into data when I’m working on something technical, DDENT is what I can listen to when I’m writing something with attitude. Couvre-sang is the perfect soundtrack for life, if you live in an epic video game.