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The duo's contemplative new song sounds closer to Simon & Garfunkel than Kiss. Continue reading…

“Black metal” comes off as reductive when applied to Miserere Luminis. Hyperfixating on the Montreal trio’s dark origins shifts the focus away from their macroscopic artistry and the other elements at play, including post-metal and classical music. These extracurriculars overtake the black metal on Sidera, the group’s third album released in March. While they describe it as “cinematic,” the record is equally novelistic. Its atmosphere is more befitting of a protagonist’s interiority than sleek camerawork or lighting. The scope matches a blockbuster, aureate peaks and valleys aplenty, yet the subject is insular.

In other words, Sidera is less about songs than it is a network of motifs, textures, and strings. The shortest track is over eight minutes. The album’s overall frame descends from Miserere Luminis’ formation as a live performance vehicle for Gris and Sombres Forêts, growing and developing in a manner more natural to a live setting, divorced from time stamps and fleeting attention spans. Ironically, you almost couldn’t imagine Sidera being played live, given the plump orchestration and expansive tracks, though this isn’t to imply that it’s delicate. While Miserere Luminis are vulnerable, they conceal that blade within a crushing sabreache. They can, and will, flatten you.

Seeing as how Miserere Luminis were silent for over a decade–returning three years ago with Ordalie–and how much of their craft is kept behind smoke and locked doors, I spoke with them to learn more about their recent work.

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Were there any ideas or themes you wanted to explore on Ordalie but couldn’t or didn’t at the time, that you did on Sidera? 

Ordalie and Sidera were originally conceived as a single album. During production, we realized we had more than 80 minutes of material, so we made the decision to split it into two distinct releases. So in a sense, there weren’t themes we “couldn’t” explore on Ordalie that we saved for Sidera; they are two halves of the same whole. 

That said, musically, there are some differences. After completing Ordalie, we knew we wanted more orchestral arrangements. We also explored a different creative approach by developing Neptune’s piano compositions more fully. “Aux bras des vagues…” is a perfect example: it started with a piano piece Neptune wrote, and we built everything else around it. That approach gave Sidera a slightly different texture. 

Conceptually, Sidera closes what Ordalie left open. Where Ordalie presents the ordeal, the trial, the struggle, Sidera explores what comes after: the transformation, the ascent. 

Obviously, Miserere Luminis took an extended break and returned 10 years after the last Gris album. How did your vision for the band change during that time away? 

After we performed concerts for the first Miserere Luminis album in 2010, we realized this wouldn’t be just a one-off project. Something had clicked. Miserere Luminis felt like the answer to an old question. We had brought something to life. 

The years after 2013, after Gris and Sombres Forêts released their third albums, were a period of personal reorientation for all of us. Life pulled us in different directions. We needed that time away. 

But somewhere around 2018, we started bringing the music back to life through Miserere Luminis. And by then, we already knew, and maybe we’d known for a long time, that this was the shape our creative work needed to take going forward. The vision hadn’t changed during the break. If anything, the time away clarified it. Miserere Luminis was always where we were headed and we just needed to arrive at it.

You named Gustavo Santaolalla as an influence on the last Gris album. Which composers guided your intentions for Sidera? 

Honestly, we didn’t have a specific composer blueprint for Sidera. It was more like absorbing different voices and letting them emerge where they felt right. 

There’s one small exception: a violin line on the first song directly quotes Clint Mansell. It’s a brief homage, a hidden detail for anyone familiar with his work. I’ll also add that, leading up to Ordalie and Sidera, artists like Ulcerate and Isis really shaped our thinking on atmosphere and layering and definitely had an influence on our music.

I know you don’t see Miserere Luminis or Gris as being DSBM, and it now sounds like there are no elements of it in your music. So, has your relationship with black metal in your music changed? Do you have a new perspective on the style and what Miserere Luminis does with it? 

Black metal is the foundation of our music. It’s the spark that flickered from nothingness. It’s our original intention. When Neptune introduced me to the genre at around 14 or 15 years old, I immediately wanted to create that kind of music. That was the first chapter of our musical lives, and it shaped everything that came after. 

But over the years, we discovered many other artists who influenced us deeply. These influences couldn’t occupy the same foundational space, but gave us new textures, new ways of thinking about composition and atmosphere. They expanded what black metal could mean for us. 

Today, it feels less like we’re choosing a style and more like we’re simply creating what we’re capable of creating. Black metal is still the core, the language we speak. But the way we speak it has evolved. We’ve absorbed other voices, other ideas, and they’ve become part of our sound whether we intended them to or not.

Some moments on the album, especially the last few minutes of “De cris & de cendres,” almost sound improvisational. Is improv a part of Miserere Luminis’ recording process? 

The end of “De cris & de cendres” definitely had a unique compositional approach compared to the rest of the album. That part was not rehearsed and worked as a full band, but was made in the studio. We had the broader vision of what it should sound like and went in the studio with the confidence we would find the right path. It has an improvisational quality, but it’s not improvised in the traditional sense. It’s constructed spontaneity, if that makes sense. 

While I cannot say that improvisation is a big part of the recording process, I can say for sure that many things spontaneously emerge in the final recording. And many times these things become fundamental anchors in the music.

You use the word “cinematic” in the press release, and that’s a great way to describe Sidera. It sounds like a soundtrack at times. What prompted you to head down this direction? 

I think “cinematic” is accurate, but that could only be said a posteriori. We didn’t plan for that sound, it emerged as we worked. 

We knew we wanted more strings than on Ordalie: Icare’s arrangements bring something unique to our music. And we tend to write in movements rather than traditional structures, which naturally creates a more narrative, film-like progression. 

But none of this was calculated. We just kept layering and refining until the songs felt right. The cinematic quality is a byproduct of that process, not the goal.

Sidera is larger in scope than many of your previous releases. How did you keep expanding your sound without ever getting too bloated? Was that a fear you had when writing or no? 

Oh yes, we absolutely had that fear. It’s something we’re constantly wrestling with. 

We simply have a hard time making choices. Our instinct is always to add more. It’s both a strength and a weakness. That maximalist approach tends to create something rich and immersive, but it risks becoming cluttered. 

The way we try to manage it is through iteration during pre-production. We’ll record demos, live with them for a while, and then strip away what doesn’t serve the song. It’s a slow and tedious process.

Based on the lyrics and the feel of the tracks, Sidera seems to deal with existentialism. I especially get that with “De cris & de cendres” with its closing lines, “Des faisceaux de ta douleur/ Je reconstruirai des soleils qui tremblent/ Sans raison.” (English translation: “From beams of your pain/ I will rebuild trembling suns/ For no reason.”) Why did you want to explore that topic?

Neptune writes all the lyrics, so I can only speak to my interpretation of them. But yes, existentialism is definitely present throughout the album. His work explores the struggle of the self to construct meaning in dialogue with transcendence. Those closing lines strike me as profoundly existentialist: the act of creation as defiance, as an assertion of will in the face of meaninglessness.

How did the positive reception of Ordalie affect your plans for Miserere Luminis and what you wanted to do going forward? 

After 14 years since the last album, there was definitely pressure when we released Ordalie. We had no way of knowing how people would respond after such a long absence. 

That being said, we were quietly confident. The material had been brewing for years, and we genuinely believed it represented a significant step forward from the last music we released. We’d put everything we had into it. 

So when the reception turned out to be positive, it was gratifying, but it didn’t fundamentally change our plans. We already knew we had Sidera in the works. We had a clear direction for it. The positive response to Ordalie simply confirmed that we were on the right path, that the decision to give Miserere Luminis a permanent existence had been the right one. 

If anything, it gave us momentum. It reminded us that this music matters.

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Sidera is available now via Debemur Morti Productions.

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