ZERO ABSOLU - La Saignée LP (lim.99)

On January 31st, 2025 internationally, AOP Records is proud to present Zéro Absolu's highly anticipated debut album, La saignée.

Zéro Absolu's roots go back to the French band Glaciation; in fact, the band is a continuation of that hijacked moniker. Glaciation was a project founded in 2011 by François Duguest (instruments) and Jean Valnoir Simoulin (vocals, art direction). The group then expanded to include Hugo Moerman (who became the third permanent member of the group), the two main members of Alcest, and Lychar.

In 2012, Glaciation released the album 1994. The lyrics nostalgically and bitterly revisited Valnoir's experience within the black metal scene throughout the '90s. Valnoir temporarily left the band in 2014 and was replaced by RMS Hreidmarr.

In 2015, Glaciation released the album Sur les falaises de marbre through Osmose Productions. Due to alcoholism issues (among others), Hreidmarr was later removed from the band. He then decided, without informing anyone, to assemble a new lineup and illegally registered the name "Glaciation" with the French Institute for Intellectual Property. 

In 2023, the core of the original Glaciation lineup - obviously, without Hreidmarr - accompanied by a member of Regarde les hommes tomber and another from Alcest, recorded a new album: La saignée (English: "The Bloodletting"). The lyrics take the form of a pamphlet confronting the enemies of the band and the metal scene in general. In 2024, to put an end to the drama, they decided to rename Glaciation to Zéro Absolu and signed with AOP Records.

The bittersweet fruit of this union, La saignée is a masterclass in nostalgic, mid/late-2000s French black metal. Highly melodic and melancholic, dreary yet dreamy, epic and impassioned in equal measure, Zéro Absolu extend the original Glaciation aesthetic to one that recalls classic Mortifera or pre-shoegaze Alcest or even Peste Noire's Folkfuck Folie, which indeed included Alcest members among that lineup. But with both songs in the double-digits - the opening title track tops 20 minutes, while the second is a mere 13 minutes - La saignée roams territory totally its own, even incorporating stained-glass synth interludes that make their hysteric black metal all the more majestic and mesmerizing. Glatiation is dead: long live Zéro Absolu!