Beyond The Styx have been ripping across Europe since 2011. Three LPs deep, over 300 shows clocked, time on stage with Sepultura, Terror, Walls of Jericho, Malevolence, The Acacia Strain. Hellfest, Motocultor, the whole thing. The Tours-based French quintet just dropped their fourth full-length, “DIVID,” via Innerstrength Records, out now on CD, vinyl, cassette, and digital.
Ten tracks of brutal dynamic hardcore at the crossroads of hardcore punk, thrash, and death metal. Heavy on breakdowns, with a darker undercurrent that never lifts even at peak pit moments. Watch the music video for “Never Ending War,” directed and edited by Kevin Merriaux, below.
The record was tracked in July 2025 at Cornerstone Audio in Luttenberg, Netherlands by Daan Nieboer, who engineered, mixed, mastered, and co-produced with the band. Art direction, illustrations, and design by Hafiz.
The “Never Ending War” music video features Lu in the dual role of Alpha and Omega, with makeup by Artizette and artistic direction from vocalist Emile Duputié and rhythm guitarist David Govindin, with Guillaume Gauny assisting. The shoot used La Roche Ballue, La Ferme de la Guyonnière, and Parc Naturéo.
The album’s thesis is in the title. “DIVID” digs into a world stuck in permanent conflict: inherited hatred, social indifference, war, environmental collapse, personal breakdown. Every track feeds the same cycle. Emile lays the stakes out:
“In a world more fractured than ever, where crisis has become a daily occurrence, cultures, values, opinions, genders, and classes seem destined to clash, day after day, for lack of any possibility of compromise. Faced with the tension of living together in an unstable society and within a self-destructive ecosystem, where truth seems to belong only to the most powerful, many witnesses remain silent out of fear, waiting for the crisis to subside. Meanwhile, other opportunists embrace unbridled individualism, devoid of faith or morals, while far too few make a concrete effort to preserve what little hope remains for humanity.”
He doesn’t leave it there. “We choose to speak, we choose to act, we choose to believe that together, tomorrow can be different. DIVID was conceived in this declining world, where everyone seems to hold their own truth. But our only truth is suffering.” The album, he says, carries what he calls a “modest ambition” of “inviting reflection today so that we may better free ourselves tomorrow from the yoke of invisible constraints of which we are, let us not forget, the creators.”
Of the ten tracks, Emile flags three carrying the most weight.
“Flowerviolence” closed the writing process for the record and brings in guest vocals from Delphine Cheezy Crust of Sisterhood Issues. The target is humanity’s treatment of the planet.
“A song that reflects the utter violence we inflict upon our mother Earth: chaotic, mixed and bloody. We all bear our own responsibility in the world we are ‘building’ for our children.” Pairing his voice with a woman’s wasn’t decorative. “It seemed essential to me to combine my voice with that of a woman, and moreover, the voice of the first local band where I had the joy of discovering a female singer in a completely different era. A return to my roots!”
Then “Never Ending War.” “War has left me in a state of shock since I was a child. I have never understood, and I don’t think I ever will, in whose name or for what purpose could we possibly wish for the annihilation of our fellow human beings? What forces can truly operate in such a process?”
He pushes past commentary: “This song is more than just a single for me, it’s an ode to the innocence of my childhood that dies a little more each day through the liters of tears and blood that water the ground of a disenchanted world thirsty for ego.” The geopolitical version of the same thought is just as direct: “We spend our lives convincing ourselves that life is priceless, while the price of peace only increases. At a time when the number of armed conflicts worldwide seems to be at its highest level since 1946, wouldn’t it be better for the West to start trying to make peace within itself before attempting to make peace with the rest of the world?” The track closes on the old Latin proverb, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, prepare for war.
Then “Bystander,” which Emile pegs as the most meaningful word on the whole record. “Although I’m not convinced there’s truly an equivalent word in my own language. We live in a sad and sadistic world, where too many people allow to happen, to say, to kill, the very thing against which our ancestors fought for greater social justice. Mainstream music itself, generally speaking, no longer reflects this ideal, which individualism has gradually devoured from within, leaving us ultimately nothing more than listeners, like empty shells at the mercy of any meaningless rhetoric. I don’t know where this world is headed. But I’m certain I’m not wondering what I can do to pull this world out of the daily blindness to which it confines itself.”
The line holding the whole thing together is one Emile has been working with since the previous LP “Sentence” came out: “No More Borders! Cross The River!” “This slogan came to me spontaneously following the release of our previous album: ‘Sentence.’ We live in a world where borders seem to symbolically embody all the ills of our modern society, according to certain decidedly conservative policies. Post-colonial borders of domination imposed by the past from North to South and from West to East. Borders that capitalism defied in its own interest, and that protectionism now tends to reshape according to its own rules, again in its own interest.”
He keeps pushing. “Without wanting to judge or moralize, some believe that borders are meant to protect the West from the rest of the world. I, for one, believe that borders only ever serve the interests of the same ‘all-powerful’ in a process of domination over the most vulnerable populations. Without borders, the entire international system would be forced to rethink itself. Everyone would be obliged to deal with their neighbor and their fellow human beings. This is probably an anarchist utopia. But rethinking the borders between North and South, between rich and poor, between cultures, between religions, between genders, could, in the long run, become the strongest bridge to international peace.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
The band’s name folds straight back into the slogan. “We build walls thinking we are protecting our own freedom, when in reality we are only confining it, brick by brick. If the Styx were a real border between the world of the living and the dead, I would invite everyone to question their own neighbor in the interest of a better future.”
View this post on Instagram
Beyond The Styx are Emile (vocals), Adrien (drums), David (rhythm guitar), Yoann (bass), and Guillaume (lead guitar). A release party for “DIVID” went down May 9 in Saint-Avertin, with an XTREEM FEST appearance locked for August 1 and more dates being announced. “DIVID” is out now via Innerstrength Records on vinyl and digital, with vinyl, CD, cassette, and merch options also on the band’s Bandcamp.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
