Pilori’s third album landed on February 6th on Frozen Records, ten years to the month after the Rouen four-piece opened for Regarde Les Hommes Tomber at their first gig in March 2016.
“Sans Adieu” โ roughly, “Without Farewell” โ closes out a decade in which the band has played over 150 shows across 20 countries, watched every copy of its first two LPs sell through (800 vinyls in total, plus the cassette runs), and, very pointedly, never hired a booker, a PR agent or a manager. That last part isn’t incidental โ it’s the spine of how Pilori operates.
Vocalist Greg has handled every piece of logistics himself since the band started: booking, promo, label contact, social networks, relationships with external partners. It has cost him enormous time, but he’s candid that the early years were worse. “It’s easier now than 10 years ago when nobody knows the band, when you have just a poor demo to send to the promoters, and when you received just 1 negative reply on 100 thousand emails sent.” Patience and perseverance, in his words. Now venues contact them first.
Greg is not quiet about how strange he finds it that most amateur bands of Pilori‘s size now operate otherwise. ”
Almost every amateur bands like us have a booker, a PR agent, a manager, it’s sounds crazy to me. You contact a band who did 5 shows and they answer ‘write to our booking agency please’ as you contact Converge.”
His diagnosis: “I guess that the social medias gave to all this bands the feeling of being famous, important, or professional. This is the Andy Warhol prophecy with the 15 minutes of fame.”
What gets under his skin is the contradiction between posture and practice: “In their lyrics, or their talking, or in their attitude, they said ‘yes, we’re independant, fuck mainstream’ but they completly act like a non-independant band and want all the mainstream shits.”
Pilori’s own answer is freedom to play for doordeal, to play squats, to choose where and when and with whom.
“We aren’t follow the path design by anyone else but ourselves, we don’t have to answer to anyone, we don’t go through intermediaries. I think that’s an integral part of the culture of this music at its core.”
Everything they’ve earned โ the shows, the festival slots, the press โ they attribute to their own work. “We owe it only to ourselves, to our work, to our investment, and that is a real freedom in addition to being a source of pride.”
The ten-year mark has also hardened the lineup into something Greg calls a well-oiled machine: him on vocals, Rรฉgis on guitar (both there from day one), Guillaume on drums since the end of 2018, Jordan on bass since mid-2020.
Six years as a four-piece. The same producer on all three LPs โ Cyrille Gachet (Fange, Year of No Light, Sordide, Monarch, Verdun). The same mastering engineer, Brad Boatright (Nails, Full of Hell, Cult Leader, Gatecreeper, Pig Destroyer). They haven’t rotated collaborators because they haven’t needed to.
“We’re even wary of introducing outsiders into our circle because our machine is so well-oiled.” What binds them, in Greg’s telling, isn’t only the music โ it’s years of supporting each other through breakups and the deaths of people close to them. Erosion hasn’t arrived. “Maybe one day it will come. And at this point, we’ll be free to stop, and maybe happy to stop and look to the path we’ve made together.”
“Sans Adieu” as a title is a stance before it’s anything else. The album is built around grief โ the loss of loved ones, and what survives after.
“Death is an important part of life. It’s tragic, it’s sad, it’s very scary, but you don’t have any choice, no matter who you are, how powerful and rich you are, how young and healthy you are. You have to deal with it.” The title itself refuses the finality of goodbye: “‘Sans Adieu’ means that death is not an end. Maybe people and things passed away but they aren’t vanished. We don’t say a goodbye, just a farewell. If you say goodbye, you give up.”
The writing process didn’t start from a concept. It rarely does. “We never thought on if it’s new, if it’s different, if it’s a change. We operate largely on feeling, instinct, and urgency. It’s often after that we realized it, and often this is people who said if it’s new or different.”
Still, two songs on this one were conscious departures. “La Prรฉsence des Absents“, released as the second single in March with a music video, leans into something more ethereal โ Greg describes it as post-hardcore in vibe, and compares it to “...et le Dรฉluge” off the previous LP “Quand Bien Mรชme L’Enfer et le Dรฉluge S’abattraient sur Nous” (2022).
The bigger swerve is “Volontaire” โ a cover of a 1982 Alain Bashung song co-written with Serge Gainsbourg, two giants of French music whom Greg and Rรฉgis are both deep fans of. It’s the first cover Pilori has ever recorded.
The source isn’t metal or hardcore, either โ it’s closer to French variety crossed with post-punk. The plan, Greg says, was to keep the post-punk spirit, lean on the live version Bashung recorded at L’Olympia, and then, in his words, “grab our own shit around it.” The track also features cello by Benoit Lefevre โ the first cello ever to appear on a Pilori record.
Across the album, Greg hears more death and black metal pushing through where the first LP “ร Nos Morts” (2020) leaned crust and grind. Nobody in the band engineered it; it’s where the writing drifted this time around.
The first single “Lรจse–Majestรฉ” has been out since February. Previous Pilori singles have moved serious numbers in the independent metal/hardcore space โ “Meurtriรจre” is past 120,000 Spotify streams with over 14,000 views on its music video, and “La Grande Terreur” is closing in on 100,000 streams.
The stages haven’t been small either: in June 2022 Pilori played the HellStage at Hellfest Open Air; in August 2026 they’re booked for Motocultor Festival alongside Emperor, Alcest, Amenra, Deafheaven, Cryptopsy, Municipal Waste, Judas Priest, Primus and Perturbator, and for Sylak Fest with Black Label Society, Biohazard, Madball, Terror, Agnostic Front and Misery Index.
Their tour history also runs through Full of Hell, Cult Leader, Nostromo, Wormrot, Birds in Row, Sumac, Primitive Man, Oathbreaker, Inter Arma, Coilguns, The Body, Fange, Implore, Wake, Harm Done, Worst Doubt, Plebeian Grandstand, Whoresnation, Cowards, Comity, Bas Rotten, Gummo, Lazare, and Primal Age.
Two of those names โ Whoresnation and Gummo โ are bands Greg flags specifically as operating the way Pilori does: no booker, no PR, no external manager.
“I really respect that cause they’ve commitment to what grind/punk/hardcore had to be and need to be: some kind of independant scene, an apart world where you’re free from external structures who promise you to make you famous or whatever.” It’s not binary, he says, and it’s not a judgement.
“What I do and what I say only concerns me, it’s not a judgement or the only truth, if it works for some and makes others happyโฆ” But the contradiction bothers him in a way he can’t get past: “It’s like you can say that you’re a misanthropic people and post three story per day of what you do at the gym club, it’s a nonsense.”
“Sans Adieu” is out today on Frozen Records (Fange, Sorcerer, Calcine, Glassbone, Cavalerie, Citrus) on 12″, CD and cassette.
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