Struggling with an imaginary Orwellian power, the Toulouse-based trio delivers heavy bangers to tear themselves away from the heaviness of the world.
On first listen to Fantasia, one might think that something has shifted on Slift’s planet. Where Ummon (2020) and Ilion (2024) flirted with eighty-minute epics, Fantasia, the trio’s fourth album, clocks in at under fifty minutes. The Toulouse natives have thus chosen to curb the long flights that made them famous to favor the immediacy of more condensed, more direct compositions. Yet it remains territory they know well.
The Slift sound remains as heavy as ever. And if the album initially seems less impressive than its predecessor, a powerful monster of cosmic psychedelia, repeated listening gradually erases that impression, thanks to bangers carried, notably, by Rémi Fossat’s grave bass, which with Canek Flores’s drums forms a rhythm section capable of earth-shaking tremors.
Tornadoes of prog synths sometimes yank these tracks from the dusty ground where they are rooted, as on the epic title track— nearly nine minutes— which opens this concept album, a prelude to the discovery of an imaginary city under Orwellian influence where the population lives under the yoke of a censoring and xenophobic power.
It will rebel to take back control, accompanied by a flood of riffs, each heavier than the last (A Storm of Wings, The Day of Execution) which, at the same time as they sweep all before them, leave behind a cloud of hope.
Fantasia (Sub Pop/Modulor). Release on June 5. In concert at Hellfest, Clisson, on June 19; at the Olympia, Paris, on June 29; and at the Beauregard Festival, Hérouville-Saint-Clair, on July 3.
