Ordeathral released Medea on 26 September, on their own, and it has taken a month for anybody outside France to notice.
It is their second album and it arrives ten years after A Cell Made of Chalk, Coal and Blood, which was about madness in several shapes. This one has a single subject: the sorceress who kills her own children, read as both the hand and the thing the hand falls on. The narrative runs through all eight tracks, and the band wrote the whole of it in verse.
That is the detail worth stopping on. Symphonic black metal has a long habit of borrowing classical subjects for atmosphere and then singing about them in ordinary sentences. Writing a libretto in French verse and then setting it is a harder commitment, and it forces the music to follow the metre rather than the other way round.
Studio Henosis supplied the orchestrations and did the mixing and mastering, Murmure Marecage recorded the female voice parts, and Chromatorium made the artwork. The band are four people from Bourges who work under single names: Teddy on guitar and arrangements, Nicolas on bass and vocals, Salomon on guitar, Benjamin on drums. No label is involved.