You, mere mortals, subordinate readers, can only listen to one of the songs from Rise‘s Resilience upcoming album, through the video above: About Duality. But trust me, your supreme guide and musical spirit, this album will be on a lot of year’s end lists, ours first! Let’s dig a bit to try and understand why.

The manifesto of Rise is all about bringing back romanticism in modern music, specifically a blend of metal, hardcore, metalcore, alternative, and other trace elements. Romance is all about evoking emotions, stimulating the imaginary, and blowing an atmosphere around itself, engulfing the beholder whole, in this case, the listener. This isn’t some sort of publicity scam or politician’s promise, but the very foundation of how music was created in the first place. You can feel it in the song About Duality, and it’s all over the album. There is a deep, anchored, honest purpose put ahead of anything else, in order to make music that truly reflects the themes chosen.

By a clever use of instruments, timbres, time signatures, tempo, scales and vocal rendition, the themes are not only supporter by the music, but pushed forward even further. The writing of the texts and music seems to be intertwined, to have evolved together, hand in hand in some sort of symbiosis that’s disappointingly rare to see nowadays, where texts are too often tacked loosely onto a purposeless piece of music, in most of the cases a composition made solely by the guitarist or main composer of the band, without regards to the other band members or what the song will be about in the end.

I don’t know the compositional process of the French band, but it does seem this way, and if that’s how it sounds in the end, no matter how they achieved it, it is spectacular, refreshing, and really. damn. successful.

This is an album heartily recommended by us, so go and pre-order the album (as soon as it’s available).