In 2021, the Alsatian band Crown released the album The End of All Things. The project, led by guitarist and producer David Husser (formerly of Y Front and LTNO, he has also worked with Alan Wilder and Peter Gabriel) and singer/songwriter Stéphane Azam, had incorporated striking industrial influences into its doom/sludge mix since its first album, Psychurgy. Things took a completely different turn with their latest album, with its prescient title, on which Crown fully embraced its taste for electronic melancholy... before calling it quits. With Your Inland Empire, Husser and Azam have teamed up with bassist Marc Strebler and drummer Nicolas Uhlen to build a new block of synthetic darkness on the foundations left by their previous project: this eponymous debut album can easily be seen as a reincarnation and sequel to The End of All Things.
While Inland Empire refers to zone of the Los Angeles area, it is obviously David Lynch's surreal and dark reveries that come to mind. This aesthetic of urban darkness is found in Your Inland Empire, with all that it implies (it's hard not to think of Trent Reznor and his various collaborations with the famous director). Scars gradually introduces us to a world in which Stéphane Azam's vocals, which is reminiscent of Nick Holmes' singing, lend a melancholy that immediately envelops us like a comforting autumn fog. A guitar echo laments in the distance, carried by the reverb. There is a light that sparkles in Your Inland Empire, but it has the modern coldness of neon. The voice, an expression of the soul, serves as our anchor and guide. We are quickly seduced.
Rainy post-punk bass, catchy synthpop beats, goths will sway to There is no Me, arms hanging limply at their sides, staring the void of their meaningless existences. Yet there's a groove to Your Inland Empire, the darkness shines like a diamond, the mood is more bittersweet than downright depressive. While the specters of Killing Joke, Depeche Mode, the Young Gods, and Nine Inch Nails began to quietly haunt the beginning of the album, the tone hardens drastically with Edge of Perfection. Azam has a metal background, having worked as a sound engineer for Alcest and Abbath and sung in the thrash/sludge band Hollow Corp. The clean vocals fade momentarily, the guitars bite viciously before a VNV Nation-style chorus (less festive, we assure you) bursts forth. Surprises, contrasts, worlds that blend together naturally.
Your Inland Empire combines influences ranging from post-metal to synthpop, expressing its taste for experimentation and rich sound with a real sense of catchiness. Pop formulas are corrupted by distortion and electronic noise, or perhaps it's the other way around. This contrast gives rise to a singular beauty, like organic life blossoming among the concrete rubble of a dehumanized world. Dreamlike contemplations are shaken by telluric explosions: the intensity of Undone, the guitars of Venom or Chemicals, which recall the sludge flowing in the musicians' DNA and hit us in the stomach, both enjoyable and ruthless, or the visceral anger of Myself Destruct's finale.
Those still mourning the demise ofCrown can rejoice: the end of everything was only the beginning! This debut album from Your Inland Empire is the first stone laid on the ruins of previous edifices built by the two musicians, drawing on their rich and numerous past experiences. The result is an industrial rock album with influences from new wave, darkwave, post-metal, doom, and sludge, something that is at once vicious and poetic, mechanical and organic, contemplative and furious. Your Inland Empire takes us on a classy and fascinating nighttime journey, full of nuances, sources of wonder, nightmares hidden behind the lights, and light sparkling in the heart of darkness.
