Hypno5e reveal haunting title track ‘Trame Noire’

French cinematic metal visionaries Hypno5e return with ‘Trame Noire’, the haunting title track from their forthcoming seventh album Trame Noire, set for release on 6th November via Pelagic Records. 

Directed by Hypno5e mastermind Emmanuel Jessua, the evocative new video mirrors the album’s exploration of memory, loss, dreams and the ghosts of the past, bringing its nocturnal world vividly to life.

On the new single and video, the band comment:  

“With ‘Trame Noire’, the title track of our new album, I wanted to extend into images the themes that run through my music: memory, loss, dreams and the ghosts of the past.

“I directed the video myself, working with models, collages, drawings and various forms of superimposition. The journey through these shifting spaces, and the apparitions that inhabit them, are fragments of the character’s memories, condemned to wander through this world. He is confronted with the traces of what he has lived through, but also with his own image, which returns like another ghost.

“Memory becomes a material that repeats, distorts and endlessly resurfaces. A cycle from which there is no escape, like an intimate curse, where the past always finds its way back into the present.”

Since 2003, Hypno5e forged a singular path through progressive heavy music, combining crushing riffs with avant-garde experimentation, post-rock, immersive samples and Latin American influences to create their own distinctive brand of cinematic metal. Across six acclaimed albums, they have built a world that is as atmospheric and disorientating as it is heavy. Now, with Trame Noire, they enter their next chapter.

Named after the French term for ‘dark infrastructure’, urban architecture designed to preserve the darkness of night for nocturnal species, Trame Noire unfolds over the course of a single night. Its protagonist is forced to confront buried trauma as every insect, flap of a wing and shift in temperature triggers fragments of long forgotten memories.

The album arrives alongside a celebration of Hypno5e’s more than two decades of existence, a complete 13LP discography box set, featuring Trame Noire alongside Sheol (2023), A Distant Dark Source (2019), Alba (2018), Shores of the Abstract Line (2016), Acid Mist Tomorrow (2012) and debut album Des Deux L’une Est L’autre (2007), which will appear on vinyl for the first time.

Album opener ‘Lost Fires’ rises from lonely keys to a section driven by Jessua’s lush vocals, followed by hulking guitars. ‘Falmer’ offers some of the sweetest and hardest moments of Hypno5e’s career: a hypnotic detour evokes the prime of Pink Floyd, then crashes into a metallic thunder that sounds like Gojira gone black metal. ‘Molecular Angel’ channels old-school prog, drums clamouring beneath gorgeous singing and ambient instruments, and ‘Bare Bones’ is a guitar-powered attack, incorporating wild leads and hammering thuds. The 10-minute title track is a suitably dynamic finale, but it remains consistent in its utter, bittersweet beauty.

Trame Noire was approached quite differently to their previous work, opting for a more organic sound. The band limited their use of samples to reflect the lyrics’ focus on one voice and one character. Plus, they used a warmer, looser style of production: less traditionally tech-metal, more inspired by the masterpieces of 70s psychedelic rock.

Even the artwork – painted by Emmanuel’s father, co-lyricist and frequent collaborator Thierry Jessua – is a raw, unrefined sketch, more human than what was seen on past covers. “This time I wanted to discover another language,” Emmanuel commented. “Every album should tell its story differently. I never want Hypno5e to become predictable.”

All this evolution also reflects the fact that Trame Noire was the first album to be made from start to finish with Hypno5e’s current lineup, rounded out by co-guitarist Jonathan Maurois, bassist Charles Villanueva and drummer Pierre Rettien.

“The new lineup brings different atmospheres,” Emmanuel continues. “It doesn’t mean that Hypno5e is going to be this way forever now, but I think there was a more direct and free way of composing. Everybody had more of a say on the decisions and the structures we put on the album.”

Trame Noire is another bold statement in a career defined by non-conformity. Shorter, warmer and presented in a totally different way to previous works, it ensures that Hypno5e remain one of one, even after more than two decades.

Hypno5e are:
Emmanuel Jessua (guitar, vocals)
Jonathan Maurois (guitars)
Pierre Rettien (drums)
Charles Villanueva (bass)