The first new Nocturne album in nine years is precise, meticulous, surgical. Openly hostile, the intense pieces blend ambient and noise, combined with manipulation, homemade instruments, and spoken voices.

"Nothing to hold onto" is what comes to mind after listening to the record, along with a sense of violent helplessness toward oneself and toward a world constantly thrown back at us by the media, plunging us into inhibition, anxiety, and frustration.

Some tracks are marked by a deep dramatic melancholy... other ambient pieces are deceptively calmer, offering a brief respite from this feeling of suffocating, ever-present catastrophe ready to destroy everything. Noise-driven and hostile tracks depict a degraded world, damaged and destroyed by humankind and its unrestrained violence.

With "Hiver Mental", Nocturne offers a vision of the world as it is, without optimism, where death becomes almost secondary in the face of the silence of the living - it, at least, is real. No more silence, no peace. It's over. Nocturne is an image of our time.

6-panel digipak.