Year Of No Light: The Past, Present and Future Collide

YEAR OF NO LIGHT are set to unleash their mesmerising new album Consolamentum and it is just an all encompassing listening experience as we have come to expect from the band and marries a claustrophobic feeling with a cinematic grandeur perfectly. They combine so many stunning elements of post-rock, metal, shoegaze, drone and doom to create their visceral and hypnotic sound all expertly encapsulated in waves of sound that can be both subtle and bold. We talked to guitar players Jérôme Alban and Pierre Anouilh about the new album and their hiatus from making music as YEAR OF NO LIGHT and their subsequent triumphant return with Consolamentum and as well as focussing on the present with this new album, we look back at the band’s past with another special release. After so long without music from them, it feels good to have them releasing music again.

With this being their first album since 2013s Tocsin, the band’s touring schedule and various other things got in the way, which made the gap between the two albums longer than it was intended to be. When asked how the recording of the new album went, Jérôme answers, “you know it was very difficult. We had to face tons of difficulties to record and release. It took us like seven years since the last album but it was not supposed to be like that.”

They prevailed though and the results are nothing less than breathtaking with epic tracks like Alétheia and Réalgar forming the backbone of this huge sounding record and the album is bookended by the opening salvo of Objurgation and the closing bliss of Came. The results altogether are stunning and this is a record that YEAR OF NO LIGHT can be rightly proud of.

On the subject of the band returning after so long with this new album and feeling reinvigorated, Jérôme says, “it’s always very rewarding that people are still interested in what you’re doing since it’s been like seven years where didn’t release anything, it’s rewarding and really refreshing.” With the amount of time that had passed between the new material and the older material, there was the question about how the sound of YEAR OF NO LIGHT has changed in that time and as Pierre says, it is still that same magic that they always have but some newer sonic expansion coming into the fore as well. “There are some sounds that may remind you of the first album, and our older stuff and you might discover a a new direction too, but we didn’t conceive the album to see how we would progress, it just happened with the direction the music was taking.”

With the evolution that their music has taken, it seems apt that the band are releasing new music two decades into their career and as they are celebrating their twentieth year as a band, it is not just the new album that they are bringing out. Alongside Consolamentum, YEAR OF NO LIGHT are bringing out Mnemophobia, a wooden box set that gathers together their entire back catalogue on either vinyl or CD so as well as the new material, fans can delve and explore their older material all gathered together too and it is a great way to celebrate their twentieth year.

With these releases bridging the gap between the past and present of YEAR OF NO LIGHT, it seems like a good way to celebrate all the music that the band have put out and continue to put out and to look back over those twenty years as well as looking forward. “We know that we still have something to say and some challenges to explore, musically speaking, but after twenty years it’s good to look back too,” explains Pierre. Jérôme adds, “we didn’t sit down and realise it was that long, time flies crazy, but it doesn’t feel it, more like five years!”

So with Mnemophobia being the past and Consolamentum being the present, what does the future hold for YEAR OF NO LIGHT? “For the moment there is only the new album but I think we have got a lot of material to make an album, maybe in one years time so I think that is going to be the next step, we are going to do a new album,” explains Jérôme. “In between we should have some releases, like a live album but our next main objective will be our next album, of course we go on a European tour in February depending on everything with the pandemic, but then we will be working on them.”

It is amazing to have YEAR OF NO LIGHT back with such a sublime new album, and with that vast back catalogue, there is so much to delve into and be kept busy for now but the prospect of new music is a tantalising prospect as well and it sounds like we won’t have to wait as long as the gap between the last two albums for even newer material, which can only be a good thing!

Consolamentum is out now via Pelagic Records.

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