Every time Matthieu and Benjamin stopped into Clรฉment’s bar and bakery in Nantes, the same thing kept coming up. Clรฉment wanted to know when the two of them would finally start playing music with him. Eventually they gave in. “It felt obvious to ask him to join Merville (and we were also worried that it meant no more bread for us).”
So that is how Merville ended up with a drummer who keeps them in pastries.
The band starts with Matthieu and Benjamin, who used to play together in Direwolves. That band had been inactive for a long stretch, and Benjamin kept going in Harm Done until that one wound down too. Both of them stepped back from music for a while, but the conversation about doing something together again never really stopped.
The name comes from Merville, a neighbourhood in Lorient, a coastal city in Brittany. It is where the two of them first played in bands, ran their first rehearsals, learned how all of it works. The old rehearsal space is gone now. It used to sit underneath a UFO-shaped city marketplace, and that whole area is being demolished and rebuilt as they speak. “That made sense for us as a band name. It roughly can be translated as ‘sea city’.”
These days everyone is in Nantes, where the scene is busy enough to keep them honest. They still turn up to shows, Fragile recently, Speedway and Feels Like Heaven soon. Watching people around them keep bands running, keep touring, keep putting on gigs, that does its job as a push.
There was no grand plan at the start. They wanted something sitting between indie and hardcore, in the company of Title Fight, Drug Church and Fiddlehead, the bands they were already listening to anyway. In the email that introduced them, they pin it somewhere around Drug Church, Touchรฉ Amorรฉ, Title Fight and High Vis.
“Something intense and heavy but melodic and emotional at the same time.” The hard part was the voice. That solved itself when they met Jรฉrรดme through mutual friends. “Finding the voice was the hardest part but then we met Jรฉrรดme through mutual friends, it clicked immediately.” That, they say, is the moment it actually became a band.
The last eight months have been full: writing, rehearsing, getting everything moving. They recorded with Jacky Cadiou at the Movie Recording Studio, a long-time friend who plays in Syndrome 81 and Prisonnier du Temps. Mastering went to Dan Coutant at Sun Room Studio, the same place behind Fiddlehead, Drug Church and the last Direwolves record.
The plan had been to hold everything back until later in the year. There was a lot to sort first: finishing the recordings, pulling together artwork and visuals, finding a second guitarist so they could actually play the songs live, plus a music video that is still being edited. Then it all sped up. The second guitarist arrived, the songs were ready, and sitting on them for months stopped making any sense. They wanted to be on stages. So two songs went out now instead of waiting for the full thing.
That release is the demo “Side Lines“, and it will land on an EP arriving around September or October. The songs come from a specific kind of pressure.
“Our songs are about the frustration that comes with growing up, less time, less space, everything getting tighter.” They sit in the feeling of trying to make sense of a world that keeps getting darker, social inequality and the frustration that rides along with it. “But still trying to choose a different path anyway!”
Wyลwietl ten post na Instagramie
For them this is a starting line rather than a finish. “We can’t wait to release the full EP, play shows, go on tour, reconnect with old friends, and hopefully make some new ones along the way!”
๐ IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal ๐๐ SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter ยท Instagram ยท Facebook ยท X (Twitter) ยท Threads ยท Bluesky ยท Messenger ยท WhatsApp.
