Review Summary: The soundtrack to hell, and also the world outside your door.
“There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.”
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
When BRUIT made their first sizable splash in 2021 with their debut LP
The Machine is Burning and Now Everyone Knows It Can Happen Again, fans and critics alike quickly connected the French quartet’s austere, dystopian ethos with that of long-esteemed Canadian post-rock pioneers Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The comparisons passed the sniff test: not only do both acts illuminate political distress through musical abstraction, they do so with multi-suite, patience-demanding compositions that incorporate rhetorical field samples and conspicuously avoid the use of conventionally sung vocals. Those comparisons could’ve easily been construed as dismissive to BRUIT, but they were largely marks of praise: flocks of newfound devotees framed
The Machine... as an emotionally rawer, unmistakably direct permutation of Godspeed’s founding formula, re-attuning the latter band’s sloganeering to a moment in time flirtatious with radical conservatism and in urgent need of social reassessment. Invoking the Industrial Revolution’s bone-chattering rhythms, pastoral nostalgia’s seductive appeal, the commercialized plundering of natural resources worldwide, and finally, the soundtrack to a planet set aflame by its own peoples’ accord and/or negligence (same difference, right?),
The Machine... was a riveting cautionary tale against unchecked greed, and BRUIT pulled it off in roughly half an average Godspeed project’s runtime, with little to no prior fanfare, and despite putting their money where their mouth is, boycotting nearly every streaming platform at their disposal.
The support doesn’t solely stem from the fact the band sounded indignant, educated, and thrilled to put frustration to tape—groups from all walks of musical life (Algiers, The Dear Hunter, and Imperial Triumphant personally come to mind) have made or redefined their careers in recent years by respectively analyzing the folly of insatiability on historical, fantastical, and
METAL METAL GAUDY METAL terms with clear parallels to the ongoing neo-fascist zeitgeist—but simply put, none of those artists’ world-building has ever felt quite as disarmingly imminent as BRUIT’s. These lads’ themes envelop instead of merely enamor, inviting essays of interpretation while leaving no room for total misconstruction. Their arrangements span naivete, dread, and dead calm like microcosms of the human lives spent and lost under oppressive systems in the blink of an eye.
The Age of Ephemerality takes things further by spotlighting their listeners’ role as a conduit for resistance instead of bystanding as a (get it twisted) pawn in the universe’s chess match. Godspeed may not have started the fire, but the most iconic line in their catalogue ironically betrays the endgame of capitalism left unchecked: there is, in fact,
always a driver at the wheel, and they usually don’t mind taking the vehicle and its passengers out with them as long as they can hog the front seat while everyone gets immolated.
On to 2025: Far right contingents continue to win legislative and executive seats across the globe. Artificial intelligence further muddies the already brackish ocean of misinformation available at our fingertips. If the enshittification of, well,
everything, seems a bit excessive at this point,
The Age of Ephemerality is here to remind you it’s all by design: where
The Machine... foreshadowed ecological crisis as its utmost priority and extrapolated towards other causes and consequences of disorder, BRUIT’s long-awaited follow-up LP is distinctly Orwellian in focus, an even timelier statement delivered with the same ideological conviction and compositional gusto as the band’s stunning debut.
It's admittedly a lateral move from dudes so (correctly) assured of their craft that they can do no wrong: as with
The Machine...,
The Age of Ephemerality largely abides by post-rock’s crescendoing cadences, building to dizzying altitudes and lining its margins with orchestral grandeur. It’s equally fixated on contrast, too, albeit indulging blurrier delineations than the clean-cut mechanical/organic juxtaposition of their prior release. For instance, the first leg of “Progress/Regress” somberly laments with slowcore-esque violin leads before buckling to its apocalyptic second half, where searing overdrive sends the melody scrambling underneath air raid guitar swells, earthquaking bass, and an outro that loses consciousness to burst eardrums and shrieking sirens. “Technoslavery/Vandalism” contains the closest the album comes to perseverant joy, imbuing its initial ascent with an otherworldly sense of resilience only to get digitized and dispersed by a discordant, gothic wall of feedback in its attached extension. The doublespeak motif is a particularly fine complement to post-rock in general—name me a great from this scene’s past or present, and I can almost guarantee you they’ve focally toyed with yin and yang—but it’s an exceptionally apt tool in BRUIT’s arsenal, especially since basking in the concurrence of clarity and chaos is part and parcel to
The Age of Ephermality’s emotional resonance.
The state propaganda angle manifests in other ways, too—the percussive, choppy “Data” takes a page out of breakcore’s playbook (one of the few musical surprises here and worth its weight in novelty) by splicing up a Mark Zuckerberg address as he tries to convince you that “more” inherently equals “better”—but it’s best utilized in the album’s final breaths; for its thirteen minutes of escalating tension, “The Intoxication of Power” locks in to meet every expectation, piling stone atop stone, measure upon measure until its scaffolding splinters and the song nosedives not once but twice back towards the ground, swarming in agony, tremolo guitars practically weeping through the distortion. It’s exactly the climax you came and stayed for, firecrackers and a gratuitous Orwell excerpt ushering you out of the nightmare by pleading for you to climb out of the proverbial burning coffin. Its closing remark is a call to action diametrically opposed to the supposedly bright tomorrow Mr. Meta hypothesizes:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The moral is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.” Big words from a universally co-opted author who didn't even live to see the H-bomb!
But find the actionable inspiration within: no single individual bears the burden of composting the necrotic social fabric with which we try to keep ourselves warm, but if it is human to want, to acknowledge the self, and to hope to preserve that which we love, we owe it to ourselves to not idly spectate while maniacal chauffeurs swerve us all over (and off) the road. Listening to BRUIT in and of itself does not constitute a shift in the material nature of our undoing—“this is a music website,” as the saying goes—but the band has now insisted with impeccable precision twice that ugliness and beauty can mesmerize without fully melding, that there are curiosities worthy of our attention beyond the mere accumulation of capital, and that pleasures running counter to material need—literature, art, certainly music—will never be stamped out unless we choose to disavow them. There’s nothing ephemeral about that; this is the story of the great experiment we call society, and as long as there’s gas left to burn in that tank, BRUIT have this whole “the soundtrack to hell, and also the world outside your door” crusade pretty much mastered.
