Demons, hip-hop and redemption: Inside LANDMVRKS’ “painful” new album

Steeped in history, and drenched in Mediterranean sun for large parts of the year, Marseilles is better known for football and hip-hop than it is for metal. Football is not really LANDMVRKS’ thing, but hip-hop certainly is.

When vocalist Flo Salfani was growing up in France’s second most populous city, those propulsive beats of the genre felt inescapable. While hip-hop from the UK and U.S. certainly had a large presence, the homegrown variety was even more dominant on the airwaves. At one point, he even had a rap project with his friends. Years later, it remains a touchstone for him and his bandmates – bassist Rudy Purkart and drummer Kévin D’Agostino, who also join K! today – as well as guitarists Nicolas Exposito and Paul “C. Wilson” Cordebard. Eventually, when it came to writing their fourth album The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been, they got confident enough to throw it into their cauldron of sounds, which also encompasses their expertise in metalcore and nu metal.

The most significant aspect of LANDMVRKS’ hip-hop side is that Flo raps in French, his syllables rolling like waves in a way that English perhaps can’t match. “We feel like people tend to enjoy our French side for some reason,” he observes. But he wondered if he should try it in English at first. “I’d need to work a lot more on my accent or choice of words, but then the guys were like, ‘Just do it in French, bro, it’s your thing. People loved it. I can express a lot more in my mother tongue, I can play a lot more with words.”

As well as being the home of metal heavyweights Gojira, France has historically been slightly better known for its extreme metal than chugging riffs and soaring choruses. Nonetheless, LANDMVRKS are among a handful of rising bands injecting some tricolore into metalcore. They count the likes of Resolve, Ten56 and Novelists among their peers, all of whom they’re friends with, while Paul has also been part of recently reformed easycore upstarts Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!.

“We have the French touch,” Rudy enthuses, and when expanding on that, Flo points to their shared sense of tenacity. “France isn’t an easy country to become a professional metal band in, so we have to prove that we can do good things. We’ve had to work a bit more than bands from other countries maybe have.”

Indeed, after almost a decade of grinding away, LANDMVRKS truly took off. It was 2021’s third effort Lost In The Waves that represented a shift of gears, bringing an influx of recognition and tour offers.

“That was a step up for us,” reflects Rudy. “There really was a surge for metal right after the pandemic, and that helped a lot of us, and we were lucky enough to gain a lot from that.”

On their first tour after what the French called le confinement, Kévin wondered aloud if there’d be people in the venue, only for his bandmates to laugh and remind him that the show had been sold out for weeks. In fact, the whole tour had sold out – and the fans packing out the rooms were crazier than ever.

Then, there came the crash. The band entered writing sessions for what would become their fourth album in early 2023, but not much materialised. “We were not ready,” admits Kévin. “We were looking for something but we didn’t know what it was.”

“We usually rent a house and write there, but we felt like it wasn’t enough to complete the album, so we were forced to write while touring,” Rudy recalls. “Flo built a small recording station and we began to write before shows, after shows, during a day off or in the dressing room.”

Usually, LANDMVRKS have fun writing music. Struggling under the weight of pressure they’d never experienced to such an extent before, they found themselves becoming intensely perfectionist.

“It was a painful album to write,” admits Flo. “I personally felt quite uninspired for quite a long time. We wrote a lot of stuff but most of it ended up in the trash. But I think that’s what we needed, to make something different from Lost In The Wave, to make something deeper. I think we had to go through this phase to make a good album, and I'm really proud of it.”

When Flo wrote down the album title, something unlocked in his mind. It was simple, unsparing, brutally concise. Crucially, it enabled him to wrench inspiration out of the dismal landscape his mind had become.

“The more I was struggling to write music, the more I felt depressed. At some point, I thought, ‘I have to put all those emotions into this album.’” He wove those emotions into a story which is also told through their music videos, following a protagonist falling deeper and deeper into hell, a process which transforms him into another being entirely.

“The transformation into a creature is something that also embodies your psyche changing, and you start to become what you don't want to become,” explains Rudy. “All the demons that are speaking to you become part of you and so you become that creature, in a way.”

They wrote for catharsis, rather than to impart a lesson. Nonetheless, LANDMVRKS know the fans will take from it what they will, and if they have their way, they might even find their own struggles reflected back at them.

“A lot of people tell me after shows, ‘I relate a lot to your lyrics and it helped me a lot in life,’” says Flo. “That’s one of the most wonderful things ever. It's not the main purpose when, when we write music, but if you can relate to what we've been through, and help you go through it, or help you feel better. That's insane to us.”

Fortunately, however, the light has come on for them since.

“We’re in a brighter place now,” Flo says to sign off. “We feel more comfortable.”

The Darkest Place I've Ever Been is released on April 25 via Arising Empire

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