On 18 May 2026, in the album announcement carried by Distorted Sound Magazine, Gorod guitarist Mathieu Pascal promised "the most singular album in our discography". Oldest line in the press kit. This time it holds.
The watchmakers of technical death metal spent eighteen years, from Neurotripsicks in 2005 to The Orb in 2023, building records like clockwork with blades soldered to the gears, every part turned on a lathe to surgical tolerance and fitted so tight that nothing moved without cutting something. You either loved that or you bled on it.
Produced by Pascal himself at Bud Studio, mixed and mastered by David Thiers at Secret Place Studio, and released on 28 August 2026 as the band's first record under the joint Base Productions and Season of Mist banner, The Ember Gone opens the case, rips half the blades back out of the mechanism, strips the double bass out from under Karol Diers and slows the escapement until you can watch the wheels turn. Eighth album. New movement.
The compass swings back to the progressive spirit of the 2011 Transcendence EP. Mellotron-style keys. Synths. Tones that could pass for a theremin. This sits closer to Haken and Opeth now, closer to Gojira's low-slung groove and Mastodon's patience, than to the tech-death catalogue that made the band's name, and Julien "Nutz" Deyres sings clean far more than he ever has. The lyrics come down from the celestial and the mythological to the ground under your feet: people, and the ecological wreckage they make of it.
Where the blades still cut
"Signs" opens careful, guitar work in tapped harmonies and neoclassical flourish, a careful hand on the door. Then "Devise" does the thing nobody saw coming: the simplest riff this band has ever written, catchy where Gorod used to be knotted, memorable where the old records asked you to take notes. One stroke of the cleaver where the old records would have made forty passes with the scalpel, and the meat comes off the bone all the same.
"Forgiveness" is the heart of the machine. Deyres sounds broken-souled here, nowhere near radio, straining through a parent's regret worked into six strings, vulnerability run through a riff most bands would have buried under distortion instead of exposing. That tapping figure is a balance wheel with a razor for a rim, spinning fine enough to cut on the backswing. The old precision, put to a new job.
The kit, the bass and the long middle
Ex-drummers go to the kit first, and I never lost the habit. On this record the kit is where the fight starts. Karol Diers takes a jazz route, fewer blasts, far less double bass. It can read as the drums fading into the background next to the explosions of the earlier records, or as patience chosen on purpose. It is the second. Pulling the double bass out on purpose is harder than leaving it on. Ask anyone who has sat behind a kit.
Benoit Claus is the mainspring of the whole case. Sinuous grooves, a hypnotic low end, a warm ceaseless string-thud from a player who is plainly the master of his own instrument, wound tight enough to take a finger off. Every wheel on the record turns because he does.
These cleans hold the line rather than lift a song the way the riffs and the bass do: controlled, competent, never quite dangerous. Deyres still switches to the harsh growl when a line needs teeth, and that contrast is doing more work than the clean passages alone.
Then "Regret", and the clock keeps ticking long after it has told you the time. The song grows long in the tooth, arriving right after the already long "Forgiveness" and testing patience twice in a row. Spacious openings, reprised riffs, or filler stretched to fit the runtime: call it what it is. Spacious is the polite word. An album about ecological wreckage should take a bone-saw to something, and for stretches of the second half this one polishes the casing instead.
"Crimson" is the counterweight, an instrumental that earns its keep on melody alone, its interplay closer to prog-rock chamber music than anything on The Orb.
"Remains" closes on contradictions the song makes work for it: progressive turns that occasionally refuse to resolve, old aggression clawing back for a stronger finish, some of the most soulful harmonies this band has ever written, all stacked into the same four minutes. The blades come out again at the end.
A watchmaker who slows the clock down has not lost his nerve. He wants you to see the blades turning.
Add it up. This is the best produced record the band has made, sinewy and potent from the first bar, playing with the hunger of a debut wearing an eighth album's craft. It is also a grower, not a record that pounces, and that is your warning label. Come for the velocity of The Orb and the first plays will feel like a lathe running at half speed. Stay anyway. "Devise" and "Forgiveness" are reason enough, Claus is a reason on his own, and the one real fault is a middle stretch that mistakes length for depth. If a clean voice on a death metal record ruins your week, skip this one. Everyone else who skips it loses the boldest mechanism these five have ever built.