Écailles de lune

This is the second Alcest album and the first with Winterhalter on drums. Where Souvenirs d'un autre monde sang softly all the way through, this one is louder and darker, and the screamed voice from Le Secret comes back with it. Moving between those two textures inside one record is what gave the area later called blackgaze its shape. The title means moon scales. Neige has described the record not as a metaphor for death but as a man leaving one world for another, literally -- a passage into a different state of being -- and has traced it to the exaltation of sitting in front of the sea at night. The title track, split into two parts, is that crossing. "Solar Song" is sung in glossolalia and "Sur l'ocean couleur de fer" sets a poem by Paul-Jean Toulet. "Abysses" was written and played in full by Fursy Teyssier of Les Discrets, who also painted the cover. Prophecy Productions of Germany released it on 26 March 2010. Ned Raggett of AllMusic gave it four stars out of five and called Neige's singing the loveliest he had done. A tenth anniversary tour planned for 2020 was postponed by the pandemic and took place across Europe in 2023.