Novelists – Nicolas Delestrade

In musical circles, there is a phenomenon called the ‘second album syndrome’, where many bands struggle a little to match the quality of their debut. French proggers Novelists were apparently blissfully unaware of this situation as they prepared to follow up their debut of 2015 Souvenirs, but bassist Nicolas Delestrade, speaking from his home in Berlin, admits they were almost talked into getting a little freaked out by it by people who introduced the concept to them.

“It puts even more pressure on you to follow up the first album when people talk about that,” he says, “because we weren’t scared about that at all, and then everyone started saying that, and I was like ‘maybe it’s true, maybe we need to be stressed about this album’.”

However, he need not have been concerned, as they have produced an absolute cracker of a sophomore release in the form of Noir. Delestrade himself is extremely happy with what they have come up with, and early reactions from fans have been similarly extremely positive, both in terms of the qualitative and quantitative feedback.

“I think we did a good album,” he states humbly, “I’m always spending hours reading all the comments, and that’s what I’ve noticed. I think most people are giving positive reviews. We have great numbers on the album, the sales numbers, streaming numbers, Youtube views and all that sort of thing, it’s been great. So we’re very happy.”

One of the concerns they did have when creating Noir was it is quite a major departure from Souvenirs, in a musical sense in that it is far more dynamic and broad in scope, and in the fact that it is actual a full-blown conceptual piece, with a very strong theme running through the record’s lyrics and imagery. Delestrade is very happy to give his perspective on what the concept is, what its origins are and what inspired it.

“What started this whole concept idea was that our guitar player has been studying classical music for probably 15 years,” he explains, “he wanted to bring something from the classical world, which was, they have this thing in classical music where they do a big piece of music and they separate it into three movements. The first one is often very fast, the second movement is slow, and then the third movement is fast again. He wanted to bring that into the metal world.

“We wanted to do a technical fast song, and then a ballad, a slow song, then another technical fast song. We did that for two chapters, we had two groups of three songs each that were structured like that. We have two writers in the band, we have the drummer (Amael Durand) as well that wrote the record,  so then he had his two chapters as well and we can make it an album that is seperated into four groups. And then we could put a different emotion into each chapter and a different guitar tuning. It’s like it’s four different EPs in one album.”

And this feeds into the lyrics and the general tone of the album. “The album is made so that if you’re feeling sad you can go to this specific chapter and listen to some music that talks to you because you’re feeling like that. If you’re feeling angry there’s another one, and if you’re feeling happier there’s another chapter.

“Then lyrically we thought the way we’d make it work with the concept would be to work around the different stages of mourning. So there’s the sadness, the anger, the acceptance and then the reconstruction. So they are the four stages that are in the four chapters, lyrically.”

Ultimately, the sheer depth of the material and the band’s highly exacting standards meant that the album took them quite a lot longer than expected to incubate and bring to full fruition. In fact, it took them literally double the amount of time they thought it would. “We thought we would be releasing it in early 2017,” he reveals, “and here we are in September, releasing it, so that shows what happens. We thought we’d be done with the album in four months, but at the end of the day it took us eight months.

“Every step was very long because we didn’t want to make any compromise, we wanted it to be exactly like we wanted it to be. We didn’t want anything to sound not perfect, in our eyes at least, sometimes we erased some parts, and did them again three or four times, and only on the fourth time, it was the good one. So that made it really long and really frustrating at times, but at the end of the day we’re really happy with it, so that’s what matters.”

The band are heading off on tour across Europe and the UK in October, with one of Australia’s finest heavy music exports, Perth’s Make Them Suffer. Whilst they are touring with an Aussie act, and while they would love to come out here, Delestrade is more realistic than hopeful about his band’s chances of getting Down Under for a tour, although it is far from completely beyond the realms of possibility for them.

“That’s the thing, it’s really hard to tour Australia,” he says, “just the flights are 10,000 Euro for the whole band. Then when you get to Australia, you get to play five or six shows, so it’s a really hard thing to do. But we definitely want to do it, I’ve never been there, but going to Australia is definitely on my bucket list.”

The new album, ‘Noir’ out now via Sharptone Records.

Related Posts

• 

  Malcura – Malcura II
• 

  HJELVIK – Welcome to Hel
• 

  AC/DC – Power Up
• 

  Scour – Black