Thirty years in, IMPURE WILHELMINA are still pushing themselves. The Geneva quartet's sixth full-length, Le sanglot, is their first album written and sung entirely in French — and that single decision is more than a stylistic gesture. It reshapes the whole record from the inside out.
If you were to pin a genre on this music, "heavy doomy rock" gets closer to the truth than anything the label one-sheet offers — but honestly, genre tagging feels beside the point with this band. Le sanglot lives in a dark, gothic-tinged atmosphere that runs through the whole record, and its strength is how consistently it stays inside that world without ever feeling repetitive.
The biggest takeaway, after several listens, is how much the French language adds character and charm to this material. There's something about the cadence and the consonants of French that suits the music's mood completely — the somber weight, the controlled gloom, the way the songs sit and breathe. It works so well here that you start to wonder why they hadn't done it sooner. Michael Schindl's delivery is the album's center of gravity throughout. The vocals are one of the album's strongest elements, and at times they carry the songs as the lead melodic instrument, with the guitars and rhythm section building the somber scaffolding around them, rather than the other way around. It's an inversion that gives Le sanglot much of its identity.
Opening track "Électricité noire" (also the record's first single, released with a music video) is a dynamic opener. It builds, opens up, and pulls you into the world the record is going to live in. From there, the band moves through a sequence of tracks that each find their own corner of that atmosphere without breaking it. "Dévoreur d'étoiles" is probably my favorite track here. It opens with dissonant guitars, drifts into a more ethereal stretch of sound and vocals, then turns dynamic with a sweet guitar solo before going darker still. That kind of internal range is what makes it the standout for me. On the other end of the spectrum, "Demain j'abandonne" is the calmest moment here — clean, almost acoustic guitars carrying the song with minimal accompaniment — and it's all the more affecting for that restraint.
"Train mort," the collaboration with MÜTTERLEIN's Marion Leclercq, deserves its own paragraph. It's the one moment where the record fully bares its teeth — hints of screaming cut through the otherwise restrained vocal palette, and the song has an energy you might call clean-guitar black metal, if that makes sense. The structures and intensity sit firmly in black metal territory, but delivered without the genre's usual distorted attack. It's a striking detour that doesn't break the album so much as remind you what these musicians can do when they want to push further.
The production, handled by Yvan Bing at Geneva's Kitchen Studio and mastered by Magnus Lindberg (RUSSIAN CIRCLES, THE OCEAN), gives everything the clarity and weight it needs without sanding off the rawness. New guitarist Edouard Nicod fits seamlessly into the textural architecture, and the band sounds genuinely renewed rather than coasting on three decades of muscle memory.
Le sanglot isn't going to convert anyone who needs constant aggression to feel something — but for listeners willing to sit inside its dark, gothic-tinged world, this is a deeply rewarding album. IMPURE WILHELMINA have found a new voice — literally — without abandoning who they are, and that's a much harder trick than it sounds.
Release: May 22 2026
Promo provided by Season of Mist.
Links:
- Official site: https://impurenet.com/
- Season of Mist: https://www.season-of-mist.com/bands/impure-wilhelmina/
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/29luUtCyre5DdAujrV8Pob
Électricité noire