Too early to decide the album of the year? – review of Mirar’s “Ascension”

January 1st, 2025. Mirar are so incredibly ahead of their time that they practically didn’t even wait for the year to start and already dropped an incredible album pretty much out of nowhere. No teasing in socials, no marketing, no nothing, just bam, new album. Rock and roll was initially about pushing the boundaries of blues, then hard rock and punk came to push the boundaries of rock. As hard rock evolved into heavy metal and punk became hardcore, music got more and more brutal and genres started permutating more and more, progressive metal, black metal, death metal. Metalcore initially came in as a way to channel the unrest of hardcore and the sheer brutality of metal, pushing the boundaries of two already boundary-pushing styles, but quickly evolved into a behemoth umbrella term that could encompass both Ringworm-esque crushing riffs and The Ghost Inside -like emotional songs. What do you get when you mix some metalcore influences and prog metal? Djent. Many people thought djent would basically be the cutting edge, but then thall came in and proved that there was still a ways to go in terms of evolution. This whole rant and bastardization of genres is basically to say that Mirar manages to destroy the boundaries of thall and present an incredibly different, niche, definition-perfect avant-garde sound that can only be described as stunning.

2024 was quite a busy year for the French-Norwegian duo, releasing two singles, “tocata”, with vocals from Nikita Zhulin (Octothorpe) and “Déluge”, both in March, with (in my opinion), the best EP of the year, “Mare” coming in June. As someone who had only heard one song or another from the guys, “Mare” got me completely hooked onto them. While it didn’t garner that much attention outside of its niche, within the djent sphere, it had a pretty good impact (shoutout vildhjarta thallposting on Facebook). I tried showing this EP to a non-metalhead friend of mine and their reaction to it was “this is like if a group of metalheads organized a rave”, and honestly, that’s pretty much it. It’s incredibly technical and complex, as any good djent is, but it blends in the crushing simplicity of more “hardcore” electronic music and the luxurious aspects of classical music (which were perfectly aligned with the EP’s Caravaggio cover) seamlessly, making for a brutal sound. If you liked “Mare”, you’ll absolutely love “Ascension”. As one Bandcamp reviewer put it, this new album is the “natural continuation” of the EP, clocking in at 20 minutes longer than its predecessor.

Following their trend of using older, more classical (maybe renaissance, don’t know the exact term) paintings as covers, this time around, Peter Paul Rubens’ The Fall of the Damned was used. Done by request of Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuberg, it pictures the fall into hell, which was a very common depiction in religious, mainly Christian, art at the time. Archangel Michael hurls a heap of naked bodies down into hell, in an almost abstract mix of colors, which makes it stand out from other works of the time. Its history is also way more modern than that, having acid thrown at it by a “philosopher” in the late 1950s. Most of the left half of the painting was damaged, but it was fortunately restored. It is also not completely unknown for metal fans, as Australian giants Parkway Drive also used it as the cover art for 2018’s “Reverence”, but not in the same way as the French-Norwegian duo.

To cut the rambling short and finally move onto the musical aspects of the release, if you liked any other Mirar release, you’ll love this one, as it is the most polished, focused and “chiseled out” their sound has ever been. Taking the first “real” track as an example, Right after “Couronne”, an almost Disney feeling ambient synth track, “Tombe” starts with a chic harpsichord riff, something straight out of the 15th century, but not even 5 seconds later, that signature thall sound, filled to the brim with heavy chugs, insane screechy pitch bends and bass drops takes over. Until reading the description of their YouTube upload, I thought all of the synth-y sounds were truly synthesizers, but incredibly, except for the ambient bits, they were all achieved through guitar effects, which must take an insane amount of technical knowledge. “Mauvais Œli” for one, is basically a borderline dubstep, dark step – whatever the correct term for that type of “poots-poots music” that is – track, like those sinister, heavy-ass rave tracks to really mosh while high on hard drugs, but with a heavy handed dose of thall.

Tracks like “Charnier” expose this contrast between an almost industrial consistency, with that visceral weight and mechanical feeling of Nine Inch Nails, while having the freedom, experimentation and unpredictability of Vildhjarta. It’s pumping riff after pumping riff, then a 10 second classical piano interlude, then back to pumping riffs, and nothing feels lost or out of place, everything incredibly fits together. They could make a straight up classical record and it’d still be able to stand alone. “Faux-Amis” is truly the crown jewel of the album, being an insane ride from the second the buildup starts, sounding like a comically large videogame raygun charging up to the simple, almost waltzesque ending. The track feels more exhilarating and hard-hitting than all the others, but without sacrificing complexity. For those who have played guitar hero, imagine you spend the majority of the song doing an intricate pattern on the green and red button, and out of nowhere, a flurry of orange and blue notes comes out of nowhere. That’s both the sensation of listening to Mirar and probably how Léo and Marius went about the writing process.

This doesn’t at all mean the back half of the album doesn’t have any highlights, the last three tracks are masterpieces. “Saint Matthieu” specifically, the one that closes it all out, is a perfect way to end off the album, as it starts off decently calm, just like “Ascension” as a whole, allowing for that quick reflection on the listener’s end, that quick “let’s take a look back at what led me here”, with one last punch to the face of heaviness coming in at once. A grandiose atmosphere dominated the song, feeling like that one last push before reaching an insurmountably tall mountaintop. The sheer consistency of the drums, paired with the uncertainty of the riffs, all wrapped up by the smooth harpsichord lines, which have been in the back of most of the songs, adding a lot of flair, creates this sound which has been present for the entirety of the record, but feels more highlighted, poignant, cathartic in this case.

All in all, “Ascension” is a Tom and Jerry-like game of cat and mouse between tradition and modernity, with your brain having to run twice as much to comprehend everything that’s going on. It is one of the few types of sound that could play both in one of those huge open air EDM festivals, for thousands of people and at a dark, dingy dive bar for 50 odd corekids without being out of place. Mirar had already innovated like crazy with “Mare” last year, and they managed to do it again, not even 6 months later. If this is what was released on the first day of the year, I can only imagine what’s coming next for metal as a whole…

I’ll let this review end off with the words of a member of that same Facebook group I mentioned at the start, a fellow Brazilian: “that’s it, Mirar definitely released music 2”.