Rouen-based post-punk/noise trio release their new album
French three-piece Servo are today releasing their second album ‘Alien’! Out in the world now, the album deals in the kind of dark, psychedelic noise-rock that storms with ease between gloomy, hypnotic moments and bouts of powerful, motorik noise. Arriving following their 2016 ‘The Lair of Gods’ LP and a handful of EPs and singles, ‘Alien’ is Servo’s first record since joining the Fuzz Club family and we’re super excited to be able to share it with you – you can stream the album in full and read all about it below.
The seven-track ‘Alien’ LP finds an unstable home between heavy, droning psych-rock and gothic post-punk; forlorn, jangling guitars and deep, austere vocals breaking down into piercing blasts of feedback and distortion. Album-opener ‘I’ sets a cold, mechanical techno beat to reverberating guitars and hypnotic, chanting vocals, the tension building until things collapse into a blast of feedback and fuzzed-out guitars. ‘Ra’, on the other hand, is a piece of heavy, shadowy drone-rock that unfolds into something completely transcendental in its second half.
Then comes the melancholic, shoegaze-y goth of ‘Pyre’ with its dense, overdriven walls of sound: “‘Pyre’ talks about fear and anxiety, how someone can feel burnt, consumed and destroyed by the part of the mind that can’t be controlled,” the band say of the song. The reverb-soaked ‘Soon’ talks of “A bunch of people that have given up on their lives. They just wait for the end to come, wishing that those who are responsible for this massive wave of despondence will not remain clean and unpunished.”
The opaque, sinister psych-rock of ‘II’ (“The description of chaos and pain in a world imagined by a crazy man who has completely lost control over reality”) leads into the motorik post-punk noise of ‘Yajna’ (“A ritual sacrifice with a specific objective. Here the main objective is to glorify the non-existence of morality”) and album-closer ‘Room #3’, which ends things in a suitably Servo fashion: as a drone rings from start to finish the band unleash a seven-minute jam that takes many forms – at times trance-inducing, pulverising and distortion-heavy at others. They say of the album's final track: “‘Room #3’ is a place of purgatory, the only path between life and death. It gives birth to something that grows all along the song, taking up more and more space before finally taking control entirely.”
Comprised of Arthur Pierre (guitar/vocals), Louis Hebert (bass/vocals) and Hugo Magontier (drums/vocals), Servo have spent the last few years bringing their intense live-show – an assault of hypnotic noise and blinding flashes of light – to growing audiences around mainland Europe and the UK. After catching their typically riotous and deafening shows a few times last year – at The Shack and the Windmill here in London, and Astral Elevalator’s Manchester Psych Weekender – we knew we had to work with Servo. ‘Alien’, their first release on Fuzz Club, comprises seven tracks of visceral, macabre noise-rock and is available on vinyl now. You can pick it up here.
