Pensees Nocturnes have put out "Et Merde", the first song from Alignement Desastre, which Les Acteurs de l'Ombre Productions release on 4 December.
The song follows a clown convinced something is after him, moving between cafes and theatres while the wine takes over from the memory. "The encounters take on the appearance of a bad dream from which no one seems able to awaken," the band write, which is roughly what their records have always done with the fairground.
Five years went into the album, and the band call its sound an oppressive, disorienting strain of noir jazz. That is a long gap after Douce Fange in 2022, and the band have filled it with fiction: an invented figure called Leon Harcore, seven tapes supposedly rescued in the late 1980s from archives marked for destruction, and no credited author.
A special edition extends the joke into paperwork, reconstructing production notes and documents as if they had been found with the tapes. The release date was set earlier this month.