MAPS AND FOILS end the year by circling back to the moment that set their whole 2025 in motion. “Nulle part” was the first piece they wrote for the album that carries the same name — the track that quietly sketched the blueprint for everything that followed. Now it becomes the focus of a new music video, a final marker for a year that pulled the band in and out of studios, rehearsals, lineup changes, and the long grind of shaping a full record.
The album landed on May 29th, 2025, a ten-track concept record built around drifting, eroding, losing bearings, and trying to make sense of that slow collapse. The tension between dissonant hardcore and those soft, airy melodic pockets is there and the push and pull mirrors the kind of wandering the lyrics keep returning to.
In the song “Nulle part”, the language sits in images of sand running backwards, ghost ships drifting through “océans barbares”, and oars snapping when strength is already thin. Everything feels half-lit, seen against the sun, hard to read: “Le sable s’écoule à rebours, je sais / A contre-jour, ne discerner / Aucun secours quand, mal armés / Se brisent nos rames.” It’s a world where storms strip things down grain by grain, and the body tries to bail out what keeps spilling back in.
The band created the video themselves — directed and produced by MAPS AND FOILS, with editing by Tristan Renet. The core trio on the recording is Ewen Brunet on bass, Lucas Lagravette on drums, and Tristan on guitars and vocals. Live, the band expands to Antoine Ambert, Lucas, and Tristan. The album itself was written and produced by the group, mixed and mastered by Tristan at Nénuphar Studio, with drums tracked at HF Music Studio in March 2024 and the rest of the instruments recorded between April and June.
Even with the conceptual frame, “Nulle part” as a song had a more practical origin — the sound they couldn’t shake. Tristan puts it simply: “‘Nulle part’ was the first song we wrote for the album. It became the blueprint of what we had in mind: Funky drums and downtuned guitars drowned in an over distorted bass.” The goal wasn’t to chase polish. “The idea was to deliver hooks and melodies in a very rough, unhinged manner that would convey the tension and angst expressed in the music and the lyrics.”
The meaning behind the track hits closer to real-world frustration. Tristan explains that it reflects on “how artists have become salesmen and content creators just to survive in a capitalist system we can’t seem to overcome. A big structural defect where art itself takes a back seat and where even money can’t compensate for the lack of time and resources.” In that sense, the song doubles as a pressure valve — a way of naming the contradiction while still operating inside it.
For the band, 2025 has been heavy, not just loud. Tristan calls it “a pretty hectic year with the release of our new album ‘Nulle Part’ last spring plus a lot of work in the shadows.” The new lineup settled in, and the reaction to their shift in direction has been, in his words, “very interesting.” Dropping a video for the album’s namesake track felt like the right way to close the loop: “We thought it would be nice to close 2025 with a new music video for the eponymous song of the album.”
They’re not treating this as an endpoint. As Tristan puts it, “Next year should be fun as we have another bunch of music videos to release and some new songs in the oven to extend the sound of the band.” It’s a quiet hint at momentum rather than a big reveal — a sense that they’re already halfway into the next phase.
Tristan’s personal top releases of the year sketch a small map of where his ears have been: AFI’s “Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…”, The Callous Daoboys’ “I Don’t Want to See You in Heaven”, Crippling Alcoholism’s “Camgirl”, Deftones’ “Private Music”, and Kompromat’s “PLAYING/PRAYING”.
It’s a mix that makes sense next to MAPS AND FOILS’ own approach – harsh but melodic, restless but intentional, always bending around tension.
The “Nulle part” video feels like a clean way to end a dense stretch of work and step into the next one, carrying forward the same unease that shaped the record in the first place.
