Description:
Toru – Velours Dévorant (2025)
Review:
A boundary-crossing, all-instrumental power trio whose members are spread out between Marseille, Nice and Lyon, Toru are behind one the biggest shake-ups to France’s thriving prog underground as of late. In a scene largely dominated by ’60s psych-rock traditionalism (largely thanks to their Toulouse peers SLIFT, whose Sub Pop signing gave the scene a major signal boost), the trio — guitarists and multi-instrumentalists Arthur Arsenne and Héloïse Francesconi and drummer Nicolas Brisset — are defiant, even hostile, genre agnostics. 2020’s eponymous debut was a lo-fi collision between jazz, metal, minimalism, and free-form improv — a skronky maelstrom from three firebrands on the verge of a breakthrough. Velours Dévorant is that electrifying leap forward. Veering from chaotic noise rock to zero-gravity prog, it’s a record that’s careless in feel but impossibly tight in execution, all sharpened guitars and stop-start shredding—think red-light-green-light, only more earsplitting. From the outset, Velours Dévorant is instantly on a whole other level of in-your-face. There isn’t any doubt about that as soon as the album opening sludgy salvo “VHS” blasts off with distortion-laced heaviness and enough odd time signatures to make Opeth blush. Meanwhile, the trio hurdle from rumbling noise-jazz outbursts to propulsive prog melodies on “Vermeilles.” But in Toru’s sonic thrashing, they eschew traditional techniques by expanding their horizons into dauntless experimentation, technical virtuosity, and superhuman-level guitar mettle—free improvisation theory taken to the extreme. Lengthier jams, like “Voiles” and the title track, are strewn with tortured strings and skronky arrangements that recall the avant-garde, twin-guitar explorations of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo or the harsh noise of Ruins and Merzbow. On the former, they send a gnarly, instantly satisfying post-hardcore riff spinning into a cacophonous death spiral; the latter is an ecstatic amalgam of blissed-out free jazz noodling, dissonant, oceanic drone, and Melvins-y wallop clocking in at 13-and-a-half-minutes. Covering a wide spectrum from chaotic noise to dynamic precision, Toru’s Velours Dévorant is a cathartic victory duly earned. — daily.bandcamp.com
Track List:
01 - VHS
02 - Voiles
03 - Volutes
04 - Vermeilles
05 - Velours Dévorant
Media Report:
Genre: alternative rock, prog-rock
Origin: France 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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