Les Chants de l'Aurore

From PandoraoceanbluNeige has talked since childhood about visions or memories of a different place, and Alcest has been about that place ever since. They began in black metal but he now calls it part of the band’s biology rather than the dominant gene, and here it gives way almost entirely to light. This is the warm one, written after the lockdowns by a man coming out of burnout who admits he needed cheering up. The opener “Komorebi” takes its name from the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through trees. Nostalgia for a place you have never been is a hard thing to put into music, and nobody does it better. Good one for a grey morning.