Take the gilt hand mirror that hangs above a dreamer's bed, bring a hammer down on it, and look at the floor: every shard still holds the same face, only colder, sharper and cut into angles that hurt to look at. That is Spiritual Instinct. The French pair who spent ten years teaching black metal to sleep and dream, Alcest, smashed the glass of their own reverie on this record, and what lies on the floor afterwards is not a new band. It is the old one, in pieces, every piece lacerating. The heaviest thing they had made in years, and not the furthest they have travelled.
Recorded and mixed between January and June 2019 at Drudenhaus Studio, with Benoît Roux sharing the desk with the band, and issued on 25 October 2019 by Nuclear Blast, the label the duo had signed to that April after walking away from Prophecy Productions, this sixth album came three years after Kodama and spends forty-one minutes across six songs, Neige on guitars, keyboards and voice, Winterhalter behind the kit. Shelter and its sunlight were five years gone. So was the slow hand. Neige, who told Metal Insider on 29 November 2019 that he is usually slow to write and forever changing small details, wrote these songs fast.
He also said why. "And this time it's heavier and darker because I was in a moment in my life when I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of darker types of emotions," he told Daniel Hay in an interview published by Will Not Fade on 16 October 2019. The long touring cycle behind Kodama had left him exhausted and cut off from the solitude his music feeds on, and when it came time to write, "I guess everything just came out. In a very violent way, actually." The same man, in the same conversation, called himself "more like an indie kid with some black metal." Both halves of that sentence are on this record, and for once the second half is winning.
"Les jardins de minuit" is where the glass first gives. A gothic bass line sets the pulse, straight out of the post-punk Neige has loved since he was a teenager, and then the blast beats arrive and Winterhalter's snare starts battering the dream into splinters while the tremolo guitars throw rime across the wreckage, clean voice and harsh voice knotted into the same breath, nearer to the band's earliest records than anything they had released in years. Nothing here is new. All of it is sharp.
"Protection", the lead single, slows the pace and thickens the blade. Its central riff is a metal riff in the full sense, built to grind rather than to shimmer, and when Daniel Hay put it to Neige that this felt like the first Alcest record with actual riffs on it rather than curtains of tremolo, he answered "Absolutely, yeah." The song sounds like a fight with its own shadow: the clean voice hovers above the guitars and the guitars keep dragging it back under. It is the best song on the album.
"Sapphire" is where the record exhales, and the breath comes early. The tempo loosens into a groove and the chorus climbs toward something close to pop. Inside the running order, wedged between "Protection" and the long storm of "L'île des morts", it relaxes a grip that had only just been established. As a single it does its work, and the band knew it: it was, Neige told Metal Insider, "the first time we actually appeared in a music video." Taken on its own terms, it holds. Taken as the third song of a record built on violence, it is a breather the album had not yet earned.
"L'île des morts" is the centre of gravity. Nine minutes long, with Kathrine Shepard of Sylvaine as a guest voice, it is the one song that cost its writer real labour: "All the songs have been written quite fast, but this one took me ages," Neige said in that Metal Insider interview. The labour shows in the best possible way. Riff follows riff, the heavy and the weightless trade the floor, a quiet passage opens in the middle like a clearing in a black forest, and then the double bass and the shrieks return to drive the song onto a funeral pyre of an ending. Not a minute of it is slack.
It is the old one, in pieces, every piece lacerating.
"Le miroir" is the shard that catches the light. The quietest song on the record and the one closest to Shelter, it builds slowly from guitar into layers of electronic texture, and it carries the record's central idea in its name. Neige put the theme plainly to Metal Insider: "it takes a lot of courage to really look at yourself in the mirror, and see yourself as you are." The closing title track, "Spiritual Instinct", then answers with a ritual pulse of toms and shards of guitar cutting in from the edges, and the record ends on a long, melancholy climb rather than a scream.
The weakness is in the mirror itself. Every shard on the floor reflects a face already seen: the tremolo storms of the early records, the warm haze of Shelter in "Le miroir", the blackgaze swell the band has been polishing since its first album. The violence is real and the craft is total, but the record sums up the band rather than moving it. The pieces are sharper. They are not new.
The deserters of the Shelter years, convinced the dreamers had gone soft for good, should return here first: this is the record where the frost came back into the dream and the duo let their own darkness hold the pen. Skip it and the later chapters of Alcest lose their hinge, because the calm that followed only means something once the glass has been broken.