Heretoir – Heretoir

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With their Fursy Teyssier artwork, Bavarian hometown, and penchant for infusing elements of post-hardcore and shoegaze into their raw black metal sound, it’s a miracle that Heretoir has yet to be picked up by Prophecy Productions. Their labelmates there would include the likes of Alcest, Les Discrets and Lantlôs, all of whom they share sonic elements with. The best comparison to the Heretoir sound, though, is the now-defunct French act Amesoeurs, who managed to take all the grimness and coldness inherent in black metal and move it from the forest to the city. Just as their lone self-titled LP evoked every alley, gutter and manhole of Paris, Heretoir does that for Augsburg. The tinkling of the piano on the intro track to Heretoir, The Escape Part I, sounds like it could be coming from a café. So could the acoustic guitars that open album highlight Retreat To Hibernate. The searing riffs of Fatigue could have been played while armies marched down the streets of their sleepy German town in 1942. To Follow The Sun burns with the triumph of the Berlin wall falling. Clean female vocals trade off with throat-ripping black metal shrieks at the very bottom of the mix through the album’s duration, while deceptively complex drumming (think Lantlôs again; there are moments that are basically jazz) and heavily distorted tremolo-picked riffs dominate the sonic space. If this year’s Woods of Desolation LP set the bar for expansive, landscape-based black metal, then Heretoir will certainly define black metal for city folk in 2011. There’s no other album quite like it.

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2011, Albums, Black Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Heretoir