When I tell you that Mirar’s debut album showcases a style of metal halfway between djent and dubstep, you’d be forgiven for picturing Monster-sipping coworkers pulling you over to their desk and forcing you to watch their favorite music videos. Then, when I tell you their music could be described as “angelic,” you might actually spit out your coffee. Yet somehow, the instrumental French-Norwegian duo of Léo Watremez and Marius Elfstedt thread the needle between these extreme styles in a way that distills their chromium sheen down to a pure drip. Digitally mulched-up guitars slam into each other to create the impression of a bass drop that never begins or ends; their flayed tones gnaw into each other, constantly revealing little pockets of melody to exploit and destroy, decorated all the while by a shroud of elegiac harpsichord and piano. It’s depraved, yet weirdly tasteful.
Adherents of a very specific, very nerdy strain of technical metal, Mirar derive inspiration less from the cyclical, polyrhythmic djent of Meshuggah than from Vildjharta’s thall sound. It’s a somewhat tongue-in-cheek offshoot that prioritizes stop-start grooves and dissonant high notes to emphasize the music’s disturbing atmosphere. To their credit, Mirar don’t get too wrapped up in the specifics of the metal subgenre wars (“We mostly just listen to classical and jazz,” the duo admitted in a recent interview before going on to sing the praises of Skrillex). The band formed when Elfstedt found Watremez’s shred videos on YouTube and decided to reach out, sharing an appreciation for the stray sonic artifacts created by using cheaper digital effects on their guitars. Following a strong EP last year that introduced their melodic, at times even mournful take on djent, their full-length debut offers a surprisingly compelling vision of heavy music’s continual evolution.
Ascension is paced with the breathless mayhem of a 5 a.m. gabber set, and its lack of vocals allows Mirar to draw all the focus toward their textural trickery: how they bend their guitar strings into mutilated half-hooks, dicing up their rhythms and wringing flecks of distortion against one another to achieve maximum impact. On “Mauvais Œil,” their guitars howl like a mammoth’s moan, careening over the song’s ravey opening assault; after a minute, a ghostly piano reverie emerges before its soft keys get crunched up amid an onslaught of squealing frequencies. “Charnier” is even more atonal, a hurricane of screeching horror that somehow ends in one of the prettiest sections on the album, as Elfstedt and Watremez keep coming up for air to wrench a few clear high notes before plunging back into down-tuned hell.
Though Mirar operate in one mode for the entirety of the album, they generally manage to reconfigure their grooves just enough to keep the plates spinning. The nuclear club rush of “Faux-Amis” tumbles seamlessly into the harpsichord arpeggios of “Présage,” though tracks like the latter run the risk of coming off as gimmicky when their classical elements seem slightly tacked-on, and the dubstep rhythms start getting a bit too Electric Daisy Carnival for comfort. Sure, each listener’s appreciation for dubstep drops being recreated by djent guitars may vary, but Mirar bring a refreshing creativity and soulfulness to a genre that tends toward cold technicality. Weaving together the sounds of metal as it’s existed for the last decade-plus, Mirar conjure a fun new type of nightmare. To them, this might just be heaven.
