Toujours Humain‘s bleak themes and chaotically pristine sound complement each other immensely to make this CREATVRE feature stand out in a time where real art struggles to surface against waves of artificial, empty facsimiles.
Release date: August 1, 2025 | I, Voidhanger Records | Facebook | Bandcamp
Extreme metal enjoyers: can we all agree that French metal is unique in how it’s approached and executed compared to nearly any other country with a strong metal presence? It’s one of those things where I hear a brand new band, no lore in my brain for them at all, and if they’re from France, I can probably tell. This is not to say that many bands from France sound the same, nooooooo; on the contrary, it’s a very wide stylistic berth from blackgaze to post-hardcore and beyond, and yet there’s this energy at the core of it all for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Unfortunately, I was spoiled on CREATVRE‘s origin before ever hitting play on them, but even without that knowledge, the sound lines up. This project is Frenched-up industrial-tinged avant-garde (see?) metal that’s tied closely to its themes of the existential dichotomy between man and machine. Per CREATVRE‘s only member, Raphaël Fournier, ‘the album bears witness to a world where humanity is one of its own relics, a vestige drowned in silicon. It’s a cyber-industrial journey, navigating between collective collapse and the pulse of resilience, each song a visual capsule drawn from this bleak tableau.‘ Metal loves its ‘what if’ statements and while Toujours Humain (Always Human) sonically may coast on the ideas of human obsoletion, it ultimately cracks through the hardened plastic exoskeleton to show a lot of heart.
There’s a distance you feel when listening to Toujours Humain, best represented with the vocals and how they’re mixed a little lower in priority in songs. This may irk some, but to me it’s a creative function of the album, where the voices retain their human elements and yet sound far away and unattainable as if being swallowed by the synthetic cyclone of guitars, prefab synths, and rigid drums. Sometimes the vocals feel purposefully hollow, others they are perturbed to the point of lashing out with great rage. If nothing else, they capture the pain and hopelessness of being replicated and replaced as humans in their own world, something we microdose each day today by reading every new story of AI being funded and expanded further so it encroaches more and more into our lives with untold, but forewarned consequences looming in the distance for the next generations to reckon with.
As Fournier states, Toujours Humain represents a collapse, something far beyond the cautionary tale we’re actually living through now where techbros flash cheshire smiles telling us everything is all right while profits soar, bodies of water lurch toward their boiling points, and the veneer melts away behind them. This may make it seem more like fantasy, but to someone very critical and downright hateful of generative AI and its unchecked growth, it views more like a logical conclusion. To that end, the album can be charitably seen as an artistic pushback against the loss of humanity in art this decade. Songs like “810-M4SS” and “Plus Humain” (More Human) have segments of war-like drums that call forth a destruction of good, natural things, a veritable machine war that threatens a new world order of technofascism, but more literal. Ever seen The Matrix Revelations or Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Something like that – bloody, violent, genocidal in nature when it comes to organic cellular life, nearly insurmountable when the machines are met on their own level.
And yet, Toujours Humain retains this hard-fought sterility to it to cover up the tumult. A song like “Hope Inc” which is very driving and calculated with edge and weight to it (a great single too) is washed away by the pearly purity of “Diffamation” later in the track list. Does “Hope Inc” represent humanity’s revolt or mechanical tyranny crushing it? Is “Diffamation” cleansing to a blank slate beginning for humans or the purging it fingerprints from the world? Perhaps open to interpretation (every lyric on this album is in French for the record), it still illustrates the warring dichotomy that CREATVRE weaves for 42 bold, unwavering minutes. Moments of calm never come without unease, and bursts of instrumental energy feel stressful in tone no matter the interpretation.
Surely, the historical significance of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus ensures France’s longstanding relationship with the topic of existentialism. I won’t jump out the window and say CREATVRE belongs alongside them, but the conversation certainly continues in its own way between the steely execution of each song Toujours Humain slams onto your lap. It’s challenging and imaginative, though perhaps in the worst way where you envision your own death and erasure, like you never existed, buried by metal and the artificial synapses that plead it to grind biology down to unformed atoms. For me, Toujours Humain is most effectively viewed pessimistically, but Fournier isn’t as bleak – the final minute of “Shaïna” is a saxophone-led glowing beacon of hope and proof that it’s not too late to save ourselves and each other from the same fate.
