For most of their career, Les Discrets has been intrinsically locked with Alcest.

Both projects are pioneers in the blackgaze scene. Les Discrets bandleader Fursy and Alcest mastermind Neige played in the supergroup Amesouers (Neige has also played bass for Les Discrets on certain tours). They even shared drummer Winterhalter—who also played in Amesouers.

But when Winterhalter decided to work full-time with Alcest, Les Discrets was left without a drummer. Instead of try to replace him to write more hard-hitting, epic metal, Fursy decided to use the opportunity to change gears. And while the resulting album is a major change from earlier albums, it maintains the same delicate and beautiful balance between darkness and hope.

Major sonic shifts are always a gamble. For all its adulations, even Radiohead’s Kid A still has vocal clades of detractors dismissing it as garbage, citing Ok Computer and The Bends as the band’s absolute peak. An artist stretching outside of their comfort zone can yield fresh new results, but it can also sound clumsy and poorly executed. Being competent with a new set of tools while also retaining your own voice is a feat in itself (we can’t all be The Flaming Lips).

Luckily, Fursy & Co. manage to pull off the transformation deftly. While it wasn’t exactly popular with their existing fanbase (most of whom were no doubt hoping for, y’know, a blackgaze album from the blackgaze legends), it isn’t a bad album by any stretch. It pulls far more from post punk, darkwave, and trip hop than the black metal and post rock of albums before, but it never sounds inauthentic or incompetent. The slower tempos, layers of synths, and grooving rhythms (both programmed and performed by a session drummer) work well with Fursy’s melancholy melodies and lush guitar work—here largely undistorted.

And amazingly, these songs mostly feel the same way that Les Discrets has always felt. The first proper song, “Virée Nocturne” (Nocturnal Trip), has the same feeling of looking over a barren land that their most morose tracks did. The uptempo (comparatively) “Les Amis de Minuit” (The Friends of Midnight) makes me feel the same way as the Ariettes Oubliées track “La Traversée,” though with acoustic guitars and post punk leads in place of the shredded tremolo picking. “Rue Octavia Mey” (Octavia Mey Street) is as expansive as the project has ever sounded before, though its scope is given more by the intricacies of its composition than the fluctuations of its dynamics. And wouldn’t you know it, even Neige shows up in the credits (as a co-writer of the closing instrumental track “Lyon Paris 7h34).

The liner notes include a paragraph explaining the themes behind the album: it is an album written to grieve “the loss of beauty, the loss of love, the loss of empathy,” as well as the senseless destruction being thrust upon the planet by the titular predators, mankind. I can’t speak for the lyrics (I got a C in French 1), but the sound of the album matches that theme perfectly. There is a deep sorrow that runs through it, as told by the minor-keyed melodies and nocturnal atmospheres. However, that sorrow is tempered by glimmers of hope that we may yet see the restoration of the beauty that has been lost. Language barrier aside, the music speaks clearly enough to translate. And while longtime fans might be disappointed to find no distorted guitars or blast beats, this muted palette might tell the story a bit more fluently.