The four seasons are one of the most common motifs in art and music since time immemorial, besides life, love, and death. The annual experience of days stretching and shrinking, heat swelling and dissipating, and trees metamorphosizing are ubiquitous outside of equatorial regions. Alcest’s body of work may not directly reference the seasons often, yet its discography frequently seem to traverse the course of the year. Debut Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde evoked the awakening world of early spring, as the cold withdraws and life creeps back in. Écalles des Lune, on the other hand, was a deep winter record, where the dark is absolute and the land falls silent under a coat of snow. Now, 5 years after the autumnal Spiritual Instinct trod the line between the light and dark, Les Chants De L’Aurore drops right on the summer solstice. What does that mean for the album’s horoscope?

Despite its release date, Les Chants De L’Aurore undeniably exudes late summer, where warmth meets melancholy and we drown the looming dark in the season’s last glorious rays of sunlight. This is the lightest Alcest since Shelter, both sonically and spiritually. Heavy and crunchy distortion is all but absent, favoring more ethereal approaches. Guitars flow like sunlight dancing on cascading brooks, shimmering like waving fields of grass, and echo like bird cries, often interweaving to build enticing soundscapes. This picture-painting approach is no happenstance, as tiny samples of birds or children detail the music as an artist would a canvas, reminding me on occasion of Disperse’s Foreword, whose uplifting mood Chants shares.

Shelter was not well-received by Jordan Campbell upon its release, but where it faltered, Chants succeeds. Despite its buoyancy, it retains a grounded footing, in large part thanks to the active role of the drums which inject energy even where the layered guitars are at their most ethereal. But nowhere is its melodious sensibility restricted to aimless, formless wandering. To the contrary, the album is replete with mellifluous flow and soaring hooks, often rendered in thick layers of rolling rhythms and bright, cascading notes that seem to ricochet across the valley. The vocals, predominantly the thin and spiritual cleans, seem to fulfill a role more akin to a one-man choir, the lower position in the mix often drowning the words into a loose collection of sounds, that nonetheless impart color to the music around.

Despite the appearance of a narrow range, Chants shows a wonderful, diverse spectrum across its concise running time. Some tracks are more diaphanous; “L’Envol” uses subtle choral backings to build towards a beautiful ascendant post-rock line, and “Flamme Jumelle” revolves around a sharp shimmering riff that winds through the entire track. Elsewhere, more weighted variations appears, such as the dynamic “Améthyste” that makes the most use of blackened screams, or the up-tempo yet inspiriting “L’Enfant de la Lune.” The clear and vibrant production allows the album to spread its wings and soar, though the abundance of high-toned instrumentation and samples can leave the mix feeling a tad crowded at times.

Bright and uplifting metal is often a divisive concept. A band that sheds some or all of its metal trappings is even more so. Alcest does both on Les Chants De L’Aurore, neither for the first time in its illustrious career, and the resulting record is a beautiful, comforting escapade, the golden sunset on a summer day spent with loved ones. After such sweetness, the goodbye is all the more melancholy, and indeed, closer “L’Adieu” is a fittingly sad but satisfied farewell. I can only hope our days may be like this in the coming months,1 but whenever they are not, Alcest has provided us with the next best thing.