Following an initial EP released in 2024 under the name Empty Eyes, Empty Eye (what a change of name!) is emerging from the shadows with a debut album entitled A Light. A light? Won’t that hurt our eyes? Before you get too grumpy, remember that the original purpose of Gothic art was precisely to let in the light! And anyway, it could be the famous ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, or the light of a flame that’ll burn us… or simply an excuse to keep your sunglasses on at night! With influences ranging from gothic rock to post-punk, Empty Eye embraces its references straight out of the 80s, with the Sisters of Mercy at the forefront: you’ll definitely need your sunglasses!
Let’s put your mind at ease straight away: the sun won’t be shining its glaring rays just yet. The album literally begins under the rain. Rain on a Window, the soothing sound of water, a dramatic synth: Empty Eye knows how to make you feel welcome! What follows is a succession of reasons to celebrate the night, as the band opts for a certain immediacy: here, there are no layers piling up, no complications, just songs with a groovy bassline and catchy choruses. One might first see this as refreshing modesty, as Empty Eye ultimately have no other pretensions than to offer us effective music that doesn’t hide, that claims nothing more than to entertain us. In this respect, we might occasionally think of The 69 Eyes: here is an album where every track is made for singing in the hearse (A Spirit Board or Black Eyed Eve, for example, or of course their cover of Lucretia my Reflection), even when an elegant melancholy tints the darkness with deep grey (the nocturnal Lonely Woman or Another Nightsky, featuring Elise Diederich on vocals, have the feel of an end-credits sequence).
But that’s not all: the vocals are thrust into the foreground, showcasing the theatrical performance of Ludovic Laffeyrie, a singer-narrator-actor who seems to embody different roles as the tracks unfold like a series of macabre acts. The catchy Just a Little Dance and the hazy Diving Upward thus take us from tragedy to menace and, despite the very different atmospheres, allow us to appreciate a guitar style whose riffs seem to need only a light tap on the back to thicken, saturate and plunge into a heavier, more biting metal. We also appreciate electronic elements, moving us further away from classic gothic rock to dabble in synthpop or industrial territory (Voltaic Demon with its delightful retro-futuristic flavour).
So there’s this knack for creating a hook, a flair for the dramatic… and all of this is underpinned by an absolutely delightful attention to atmosphere. Empty Eye speaks of a cinematic approach, as a way of breathing new life into their influences. While the term is often misused, it takes on its full meaning here: the melodies seem to have come straight out of a gothic fantasy film, somewhere between dark poetry, melancholy and spectral dances... give them an organ, a harpsichord and a smoke machine, for all of this evokes the flamboyance of the Grand Guignol!
Empty Eye conjures up a delightfully macabre imagery, a unabashed delight in cobwebs, tombs, and cursed, tormented creatures in the rain. You listen to the album as if listening to horror stories told by a strange fellow wearing a dusty top hat at the entrance to a crypt, but also for the simple, genuine pleasure of wiggling about in our coffins. You know that expression that says that something is "no small feat"? Well, here it is: Empty Eye is no small feat, as in "six feat under"!
