After a first decade marked by frequent releases, Devil-M had been quieter since the album Astharat came out in 2020. The industrial metal band is back with Titanomachie and, interestingly, the album is not being released on a Friday as tradition dictates, but two days later, on Sunday 30th November, to coincide with the birthday of singer and project founder Max Meyer. How sweet! Right, enough with the sweet stuff, let's dive into Titanomachie.
Devil-M have always taken great care with the narrative surrounding their creations, enveloping their music in a mystical, even mythological dimension. This is once again the case here with an apocalyptic tale set against the backdrop of Greek mythology: while Titanomachy recounted the defeat of the Titans, the album depicts their revenge. It all begins with Sisyphus stopping pushing his rock and the events that unfold from this day off see Kronos and his friends regain control of Olympus, causing the death of the pantheon and plunging the world into death, fear and silence. That's the background to Titanomachie.
To illustrate such a narrative, a theatrical setting was needed, which Sisyphos provides from the outset. Menacing guitars, more ambient and cinematic passages... Devil-M sets the mood as a funeral litany rises. Then, the ingredients fall into place, immediately familiar despite the time gap between Titanomachie and its predecessor: the German language arrives in the second part of Gott, the vocals alternate between raw screams, sinister cavernous growls and expressive, tortured lamentations. The rhythms are strict, the riffs relentless, mixing martial rigour with aggressive speed. Although German, the band's take on industrial metal does not look so much to its compatriots as to the darker and more violent excesses of Psyclon Nine or Dawn of Ashes, with a touch of Mansonian mannerism. It should also be noted that Nero Bellum is responsible for the samples on Gott and Komplex and that Krystof Bathory is in charge of mastering...
The atmosphere created by these desperate cries and nightmarish settings is grandiose and apocalyptic. Devil-M cultivates both its putrid scent of ruin (Tartarus, for example, with its mysterious whispers, seems haunted by the ghosts of slaughtered gods) without neglecting its sense of catchy phrasing (the heaviness of Komplex is ideal for crushing skulls, Imperium, with its electro-punk energy, is ideal for shaking your booty).
Small touches of dark electro (Apocalypto and its cold melancholy, which gradually builds and intensifies when the guitars come in) and contemplative layers impose their coldness and a few nostalgic touches. It is with echoes of this feeling that Titanomachie leaves us, while Heaven gives the mythological scope a more intimate conclusion, taking us from a grandiloquent tale full of deities and destruction to mourning, emptiness and the abandonment of the survivors. This is an ambitious album in its storytelling, a hybrid monster where human emotions are grafted onto divine excess... but above all, it is biting industrial metal that will appeal to fans of tormented and theatrical universes.
