Metal
Base Productions · 28 August 2026
On “Forgiveness”, the third track, Gorod spend the first two and a half minutes not attacking. The intro is long, the guitars stack up slowly and Julien Deyres arrives singing rather than screaming; once the piece makes up its mind, around the three-minute mark, what sits on the other side is seven minutes twenty-six of progressive rock with the weight of metal underneath. It is the longest of the eight tracks on “The Ember Gone” and the one that best explains what has happened: the Bordeaux quintet, who had lived off technical death metal since 1997, have dropped the revs. It came out on 28 August on Season of Mist in association with Base Productions and runs forty-three minutes fifty-one.
That does not mean they have unlearned anything. “Regret”, seven forty-four, is at once the most technical piece on the record and the one that most resembles a song: it opens with Mathieu Pascal and Nicolas Alberny’s guitars interlocked and vocal melodies that recall Mastodon fifteen years ago, and spends the rest of its length building tension and then undoing it with interludes that lower the volume instead of raising it. “Crimson” and “Ignite” run the same operation in four and a half and six and three-quarter minutes respectively, and “Remains”, released as a single on 17 July, closes the most direct stretch of the album at five fifty-eight. Karol Diers and Benoit Claus hold down a foundation that no longer has to resolve twenty time-signature changes per track.
The price of the change shows in the first half. “Signs” and “Devise” open the record at roughly four and three-quarter minutes each and sit halfway between the two approaches: they have neither the density of “Æthra” (2018) nor the development of the two long pieces, and they function as an introduction lasting nine and a half minutes. “Ember”, the seventh, is a minute fifty-four of interlude, so only three of the eight tracks pass the six-minute mark, and it is in those three that the record holds up.
It arrives three and a half years after “The Orb” (8 March 2023) and is the eighth album by a band that was called Gorgasm before the first one, “Neurotripsicks” (2004).
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Roger Estivill