Formed 10 years ago, Cenotaphe have quietly issued a handful of releases with which they’ve established themselves at the forefront of the contemporary French black metal underground. Fog, who plays all the instruments on the album, began writing and recording these tracks in 2020, working on them for the next four years as vocalist Khaosgott pored over the lyrics. Musically and thematically, “Chimères” strikes a tone more forceful and direct than the band’s earlier recordings. The chimera—a Greek mythological beast depicted as a hybrid fusion of a snake, lion, and goat—represents the all too human pursuit of hopeless and illusory dreams, and the deranging delusion of utopias that burn brightly in the minds of men but disappear beneath their touch like a mirage. Khaosgott eschews to some extent the evocative poetics of his earlier writing in favor of a voice that is elemental and earnest amid a vortex of grief, capturing what it means to be at the center of the wheel—equidistant from son and father—turning eternally through the seasons of mortality; to gaze despairingly out at the world, yet look fearlessly inward, through the unknowable and unnamable darkness within, and emerge stronger; to tend earthly gardens, tilling the blood-soaked soil suffused with the ashen bones of ancestors and shielding emergent seedlings from the pests and vermin gathered at the perimeter.