Dééfait reject meaning for oblique tension on absurdist “I Promise To Divide You”

It's closer to ritual than ballad, an act of psychedelic sonic landscaping that serves to survey and explore through noise rather than obliterate. In doing so, the band occupy a far uncannier corner of the contemporary experimental landscape. That of wanderers and drifters who aren’t so much searching for meaning but, in their wanderings, exposing its absence.

Despite its creeping mood and darkness, “I Promise To Divide You” is a relatively lighter shade of Dééfait. The band's drummer Pablo Valero describes their self-titled debut album – due October 2nd – as “shaped a little bit, like going from dark to brightness.” There are different moods on the LP, and their latest single is just one of them. “Then the people will discover the darker side of the album.” Though if this Dééfait’s lighter side, it makes you wonder just how dark things will get. With its ritualistic drumming and interlocking guitars, the track carries a brooding menace.

Like all their songs, it comes from jamming: “When we are not preparing gigs, we just jam.” “Sometimes we can jam for 40 minutes,” says bassist Adrien. “We record everything. Some of the ideas when we end the jam, we’re like, ‘Oh yes, this is good. We should stick to it and try to make a song out of it that is not 40 minutes long.’”

Their methodology is seen in their forebears and influences, as Pablo mentions: “My brother Lucas and I, when we were teenagers, we used to listen to Can and Boredoms a lot. So somehow it must stand up in the music.” Though Lucas, who plays guitar in the band, adds “It's hard to say about the influences because we try to not make a preconceived thing.” It’s a view I completely agree with. While Dééfait may carry forward the touch of psych transcendence through the twin axes of noise and drone, their sleek dynamics, clear chemistry, and experimental choices elevate them into something uncanny.

The band's most immediately unique element is their vocals. Singer Ric Lara brings a unique ethereal tone, that makes his voice on lead single “I Promise To Divide You” sound like a monologue echoing through a desert tundra. Though at other points it's more mystical, resembling a chant spoken at a shamanistic ritual. Swapping Mexico City for Paris, Lara’s tone comes from an outsider perspective with Dééfait being his first musical project: “I started to make music really with them. Then I started to enter their rhythm, and then I needed to create this voice.” Like the rest of the band, his voice has some influences, with Lara naming Moor Mother and Gazelle Twin as recent listens that have left an impact.

But defining Lara’s voice in terms of influences or sonics undermines its impact. The way it flows, with light tones that contrast the noise, resembles a fellow instrumentalist rather than a traditional frontman. Lara likens it to painting: “I don't want to make something like classic rock or pop music with the kind of rhythm, with my voice like that. I'm just trying to put some sounds with my voice inside the music. Even right now, I'm just trying to discover, how can I do that? It's new for me, but it's a kind of experimentation all the time. I think that the most important thing for me is to try a lot of things, to put some colours in this kind of tableau.”

Dééfait’s musical trajectory resembles a constant, ever-evolving journey because of this experimentation. One that’s seen them slowly emerge out of the French underground into the wider European festival circuit. Of course, it’s hard to imagine many noise bands ever overtaking France. While the quintet is keen to note their excellent contemporaries in The Psychotic Monks, and drone trio France, even in their home country, Dééfait remain a relative oddity. But in their abstraction, the odd mesh of floating undefinable vocals with rigid kraut grooves and searing guitars, the band themselves become the questioners. Their constant contradictions reflect the absurdity of the written rules of power and discourse.

At the heart of their new album is an exploration of identity. According to Lara, “The idea that we call true identity, or even our personality, is often created by language and by the stories surround us.” His mix of tones and syntax reflects this. For Lara, the core idea is best explained through a metaphor – an image that came from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. “The story, it's an archaeologist who spent years opening this pyramid. He's digging and he's digging, and he's opening the Ancient sarcophagus, expecting to discover a big thing, no? But when he finally arrives to open the thing, it's completely empty.”

“I love this metaphor to guess that maybe our identity is also like that layer after layer of language, culture and stories. Perhaps nothing's fixed at the centre, and we are completely a void there.” That's why, on the album, Lara’s lyrics constantly play with contradiction. “I mix languages, grammaticals, genders. The syntax is broken and fragmented, I wanted the writing itself to reflect that idea.”

It could be easy to imagine these strong conceptual underpinnings overtaking the music, yet Dééfait consistently bring the two together in ways that make both stronger. The ever-tilting edges of “I Promise To Divide You” create a constant sense of collapse and separation that never fully occurs. Lara’s lyrics capture an incoming obliteration that the instruments edge towards, but never fully unveil.

The core synchronicity of elements combined with their interests leads me to ask if they bring their jamming into their live performances. But outside of a few long-form drone endings, they keep things as tight as possible. For the band, Pablo notes those moments of excess are reserved for “only if we feel that it's something that the audience would enjoy as much as us.” with Pablo noting that

“There's nothing more boring than seeing a band having fun on stage at the expense of the audience that is bored, this is something we are never going for.” Despite the absurdity and abstraction at their core, Dééfait remain a band as brilliant sonically as they are conceptually. You only need to listen to the single to understand what the band is going for. It sounds stark and enthralling in equal measure; it whets the appetite for much more.

Even if it doesn't suggest an answer or a meaning, Dééfait’s music leaves you wondering in a way that few other noise bands are capable of.