The new single lands with the kind of weight that doesn’t need introduction, especially for fans of this unique French and European screamo vibe. “Merci les cendres” arrives as the next chapter in a cycle that Gros Enfant Mort have been building toward all year, following “Saigne! Saigne! Saigne!” and marking the lead-up to their album “Le sang des pierres”, out 23 January 2026 through Moment Of Collapse Records, Fireflies Fall, No Funeral Records, and Spleencore Records.
The band chose to release the track with an official video directed and edited by Arthur Chowca, keeping it unlisted until this premiere.
“Merci les cendres” narrows in on a moment that sits somewhere between collapse and movement. The band frames it as the instant when depression loosens its grip just enough for sensations to return, “a tentative attempt to be reborn in a world that’s still burning.” That idea threads directly through the lyrics. The opening line — « Je vois des couleurs. / Je croyais que mes yeux étaient morts. » — gives the song its first pulse, almost like someone surfacing after too long underwater. There’s no triumph in it, just a low-frequency recognition that something is shifting: « Une éternité dans le brouillard / mais quelque chose se reconnecte. »
Recorded in April 2025 in Parthenay and Poitiers with engineering by Louis Bastide at Studio Stadie, mixing by Caryl Marolleau at Studio Safuzz, and mastering by Thibault Chaumont at Deviant Lab Studio, the track carries the same dense, abrasive character that defines the rest of the upcoming record. It’s not polished for comfort.
The guitars scrape, the drums stay tight and forceful, and the vocals move between urgency and disorientation. When the chorus breaks open — « Je crame mes mauvais rêves. / Et je crois que je remonte la pente. / Merci les braises. / Merci les cendres. » — it feels less like release than a steadying breath before taking another step forward.
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The themes of the single sit directly inside the framework the band has been shaping for “Le sang des pierres”. The album, as they describe it, grew out of exhaustion and a slow collapse, written in the aftermath of trying to sustain oneself in a world that keeps tightening the screws. Alexis writes: “The need to create this album was born out of exhaustion, out of emptiness, a slow, almost invisible collapse after years of effort trying to find a place in a hostile world.” He sees depression not as an individual defect but as a reaction — “a symptom of a system that alienates and consumes.”
That’s the lens that runs through the full record. Where their 2022 LP “La banalité du mal” dealt with everyday cruelty, the new album pulls those forces inward. Alexis calls the project a form of testimony: “Not to beautify. Not to heal. But to bear witness.” He writes about a “devouring alienation” shaped by social demands, workplace pressures, grief, the sense of being cut off, and the tendency to self-diagnose instead of looking at the structures that grind people down. What emerges is not resignation but what he calls “a constructive rage” — a refusal to adapt to what harms, and a push to exist differently.
Inside that context, “Merci les cendres” becomes a hinge moment. The song lives in the tension between terror and forward motion, in lines like « Au milieu de la fournaise ressurgissent des peurs plus si éphémères. » and « L’avenir se calcine et c’est peut être mieux comme ça. » There’s an insistence on keeping momentum even when nothing feels guaranteed: « Même si le temps presse. / Même si tout flambe. » The track holds onto that thin thread of possibility without romanticizing it. It’s the sense of someone taking stock of ruins and choosing to build anyway.
The album itself pushes this further. “Le sang des pierres” presents what the band describes as “the smell of rain hitting dry earth” — that jolt of life that arrives unexpectedly after months of numbness, when you’ve nearly forgotten what it feels like to sense anything at all. Across nine tracks (“Cloué au sol”, “Saigne! Saigne! Saigne!”, “Château de cartes”, “3114”, “Étranger à la Terre”, “Paillasson 4ever”, “L’art de perdre”, “Merci les cendres”, and the closing “Le sang des pierres”), the group channels a sound shaped by French screamo and American post-hardcore, leaning into dense walls of guitar, precision in the rhythmic push, and fragments of melody that appear just long enough to anchor the emotional weight.
Gros Enfant Mort’s roots go back to 2019 in Poitiers, first as a solo project that grew into a full band. The influences are visible — Daïtro, Amanda Woodward, Sed Non Satiata, Verse, Have Heart, Defeater — but the band uses them as references rather than templates. Their 2019 self-titled EP and the 2022 LP set the tone for touring across Europe and exploring what it means to speak openly about depression, isolation, performance pressure, and the myths of constructed happiness. The new record extends that work into something heavier and more internal.
“Le sang des pierres” is not framed as restoration. Alexis writes: “Pain isn’t an error, it can be a form of clarity. A signal. A call to change course.” The album documents how far a person can fall, and the uneven, uncomfortable ways one begins to move again. “Not necessarily alone. Not necessarily clean. Not necessarily fast. But possible.”
“Merci les cendres” sits at that crossroads — a song about climbing back up the slope with the heat still rising behind you, carrying only what survived the fire. It’s a quiet kind of persistence, shaped by the understanding that nothing about the world has softened, yet something inside has shifted just enough to try again.
The full album “Le sang des pierres” arrives 23 January 2026.
