Alcest have announced their first live album. Live at Hellfest 2022 comes out on 4 December through Nuclear Blast, on limited vinyl and digitally, and Protection is out from it now.
Nineteen years of records and no live one is unusual for a band at this level, and it says something about how Alcest have treated their own material: the studio versions are built on layers and reverb that a festival stage is supposed to ruin. Putting out the Hellfest set is an argument that it does not.
The set spans everything up to 2022, from Souvenirs d'un autre monde in 2007 to Spiritual Instinct in 2019, which means the whole arc from the first record, where the black metal was only a memory, to the one where it came back.
Nothing from Les Chants de l'Aurore is on it, because that album came out two years after the performance.