Glauque (BE)

What is Glauque? A color? An atmosphere? A moment in time? Or perhaps all of that, condensed into the journey of a band whose story began in 2017, when Louis Lemage, a student who had dropped out and wanted to turn his raw, wounded writing into songs, recorded a few demos with Aadriejan Montens, then studying at the Namur Conservatory in Belgium. A few months later, Baptiste and Lucas, also students at the Conservatory, joined them. The four quickly began performing live, making the search for a name necessary. Glauque it was.

Following their six track EP Glauque, which gathered their early singles, Les gens passent, le temps reste became their first full-length album. Much like the group’s name, which plays on polysemy, Glauque’s music stands out through its ability to express both darkness and a fierce will to live. « Facing loss with what it leaves behind, the good and the bad » is the thread running through the album’s twelve tracks. This notion of loss goes beyond the feeling of impermanence implied by the album title, and beyond the grief carried over ten minutes in the closing track Deuil. It only partially overlaps with the heartbreak of Bleu.e, the disenchantment of Plan Large, or the fatalism of Pas le Choix.

No, what seems to have gone missing along the way is something deeper: the very feeling of existing. Or of existing poorly, incompletely. Hence the surge of clear-eyed self examination in Plusieurs Moi, where Louis confronts himself and his doubts, confessing « I am not an artist. » Hence the unflinching self-portraits of Friable and Noir, where the lyrics expose imposture, both the author’s and everyone else’s, leaving behind the bruised face of a boxer after the bell. At moments, one might think of the self-lacerating honesty of Brel, yet the industrial beats, as if produced by the valves and pistons of an icebreaker’s engine room, pull the music back into a stark, modern world from which escape seems possible only through intoxication, especially the intoxication of dance. Each lyric becomes a leap into the void of an era stripped of horizons. Starting a family? Rance rejects the idea altogether. A nihilistic gesture? More a search for truth. Lying neither to oneself nor to others. Admitting one’s multiplicity in a world reluctant to recognize complexity. Bearing mortality without reaching for the comfort of a mythologized past, without seeking shelter in melancholia, without believing in love yet still searching for it. And turning despair into a combative bond.