When “Senicarne” came out in July 2020, Fall Of Messiah watched it disappear into the pandemic. Four years of writing, no rooms to play it in. Three months later, Holy Roar Records shut down. The five-piece from Saint-Jans-Cappel โ a village in French Flanders about twenty minutes north of Lille โ spent the next two years not really sure what to do with themselves.
“It was a real emotional blow,” drummer/vocalist Pierre “Meul” Bailleul says. “It left a sense of frustration that only grew stronger when our label shut down just three months later. For a while, we felt stuck, and it took us nearly two years to find our way forward again.”
What pulled them out was a tour invitation from Antoine at Chalk Hands in 2022 โ a European run the two bands did together.
“Living on the road together reminded us why we started this project in the first place,” Pierre says. Shortly after they got back, Moulin brothers Martin and Sylvain โ the main songwriters, on guitar/vocals and bass/vocals respectively โ began sketching the first ideas for what became “Green Lands.”
It’s out April 24th on Voice Of The Unheard Records in France, with Dog Knights Productions handling the UK and Persistent Vision Records handling the US.
Then Matthieu Raoult, the original guitarist, decided to leave in March 2023. That forced a harder conversation than just a personnel change. “It was a difficult moment on a human level,” Pierre says.
“It forced us to question everything โ not just musically, but also what we wanted to build together as people.” They spent a few days locked in the studio and came out the other side as a four-piece. That new form laid the foundations for “Green Lands” at Clรฉment Decrock’s Boss Hog studio in Ham-en-Artois, across sessions that ran from late 2023 through to spring 2025. Decrock recorded, mixed and mastered the record.
After tracking wrapped, bassist Benjamin Defer stepped away from the band to focus on something personal โ and Florent Gerbault (Nord, Opulent Gold, Tellmarch, ex-Nesseria) joined on second guitar.
He’d already been a regular on their tours, so the adjustment didn’t feel jarring. “He already knew the band, and very quickly, he became part of that balance,” Pierre says. “A new member always shifts the dynamic, but it also brings new energy and new ways of seeing things.”
The current lineup on “Green Lands” is Sylvain Moulin (bass/vocals), Martin Moulin (guitar/vocals), Florent Gerbault (guitar) and Pierre Bailleul (drums/vocals). About that dynamic โ when Pierre describes it, he keeps it unromantic:
“We don’t really consider ourselves a band, but first and foremost a bunch of buddies, because that’s what we are, and making this album has been really good for us. Sylvain has a little girl, and we’re not going to keep doing this until we’re 50. We’ll end up making acoustic albums like Thrice, wearing our plaid shirts. Touring the world like we used to isn’t possible anymore, so we thought, “Come on, we have to go out with a bang if it ever has to end.” Even though, mind you, that’s not on the cards right now. But we wanted to make a statement. Just because Mathieu left doesn’t mean our identity has ended, or that we have too.”
Fall Of Messiah have been at this since 2008, when the EP “How to Build a Chariot” came out. Four LPs followed โ “How to Conceive a Bridge Between Circles” in 2010, “How to See Beyond Fields” in 2013, “Empty Colors” in 2016 (Holy Roar Records), “Senicarne” in 2020 (Holy Roar, then Church Road) โ alongside more than 300 shows across Europe and the UK, handled without a booking agency.
They’ve shared stages with La Dispute, Chalk Hands, Rolo Tomassi, Lost In Kiev, Employed to Serve, Bruit โค, Listener, Pelican, Kidcrash, State Faults, Shy, Low, Au Revoir, Le Prรฉ ou Je Suis Mort, Celeste, Tides From Nebula, Mutiny on the Bounty, Aviator, Maybeshewill, Year Of No Light, Monarch, We Never Learned To Live, Retox, Caravels and Shirokuma. Festival credits run through Ieper Hardcore Fest, Dunk!, StrangeForms, Arctangent, Post In Paris, Portals and Mainsquare.
The band describe themselves briefly as a bunch of friends from the same village losing themselves between post-everything, pulling from the melancholia of post-rock, the wall of sound of post-hardcore, and the energy of screamo. They write songs about solitude, the beauty of silence, and the endless search for a simpler life in the heart of nature. The reference points they throw out: Envy, Caspian, Pianos Become The Teeth, Cult Of Luna, Caravels, State Faults, If These Trees Could Talk, Thrice and pg.lost.
Two decades in and they’re mostly still writing songs the way they always have โ deconstructed bass and drums underneath guitars that swing between dissonance and the ethereal, with screams that hang in the distance rather than sitting on top of the mix. On “Green Lands,” the screams take up more space than before. Pierre reckons this one leans slightly more rock-oriented than “Senicarne” without losing the soaring stretches or the pure chaotic ones. Occasional arpeggios thread through for something softer.
“Tour de force” carries a guest feature from Chalk Hands โ Antoine Mansion and Tommy Hampshire on vocals, and Fabien Verwaerde on trumpet.
The ten tracks sit inside a story about going from anxiety to something like peace. Pierre moved in 2021 to a small, all-wood farmhouse where the forest starts 200 meters from his door, and that’s where most of the record’s thinking came from.
“I’m someone who gets stressed very easily, and now I only have to walk 200 meters to find myself in the forest. It changed my perspective on life. I went through some painful family situations, which made me realize how much I complained about everything on a daily basis and that it was time to change that, to enjoy the present moment and find my balance. And I found it in hiking, in the “green countryside.”
“I’m refocusing on what’s important to me. Today it’s family, friends, and music. I find peace because I know what I want to be and how I need to get there. And to do that, I know I have to walk in the forest. I’m very inspired by nature, by the calm and rural atmosphere that surrounds me, and that’s what inspired the whole concept behind it. The idea is to find your place, and I think I’ve found mine with this balance.”
The tracklist follows that arc. The record opens on barriers and mistrust, staying put in the watchtower. The turning point comes on “Tour de force,” accepting the change and letting the peace in. The closing “A joy of lesser means” lands the whole thing on a walk in nature and a simpler relationship with your own head.
For Fall Of Messiah, music has been the workaround for a group of naturally reserved people who struggle to talk about how they feel. Despite more than two decades of friendship, it’s only recently that the members have started opening up to each other about their personal lives. “Green Lands” reads as a catharsis record in that specific sense โ sadness and anger working themselves out through screamo as the pressure release, with the catch that the calmer passages are what the album actually wants you to arrive at.
“Green Lands” also closes a trilogy that started with “Empty Colors” in 2016 and continued with “Senicarne” in 2020 โ a run that put Saint-Jans-Cappel on the screamo, post-rock and post-hardcore maps after a decade of work. Pierre walks through the arc:
“I think that since Empty Colors, we really found a compositional direction that still drives us today โ something balanced between the raw intensity of emoviolence bands like Kaospilot, and the more atmospheric, intimate or expansive approach of postrock bands like Caspian. Empty Colors had a certain kind of naivety to it.”
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“The songwriting was more fragmented, but you could already feel the full spectrum of what we wanted to explore. It was like a first attempt at defining our identity, without overthinking it. With Senicarne, we pushed that vision further. We embraced that wide musical range, but with a much deeper focus on melodies and atmospheres.”
“We also spent a lot more time working on the rhythmic foundation โ especially the interaction between bass and drums โ to give the songs more depth and cohesion. Green Lands feels like a natural continuation of that journey, but with a more mature and grounded approach. This time, we focused even more on emotions and atmospheres, but in a simpler and more direct way. The compositions are probably just as complex as on Senicarne, but they feel more fluid, more instinctive โ almost more natural to us. I remember sometimes testing riffs in rehearsal and looking at ourselves like “yup, the song has to go this way.””
The emotional temperature shifts across the three records too. Pierre puts it as a gradient: “Empty Colors was quite dark, Senicarne felt deeply melancholic, and even if Green Lands still carries some of that weight, it also feels lighter โ maybe more peaceful, or even slightly hopeful.”
There’s a visual throughline too โ the green in the artwork gets more dominant from one cover to the next, and the vocals take up more space each time. Pierre admits to worrying about whether the band’s style is distinctive enough, citing Thrice, Deftones and The Bled as groups that throw something new onto every record.
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Two other Pierre notes worth keeping. On origins: “Our beginnings were in the math rock genre, and it’s because we listened to a lot of post-rock that we took this tangent. We found ourselves somewhere between the two, even though we loved screamo. It’s this mix of genres that we’ve always struggled to balance.” And on direction: “I feel like we’re moving towards something more rock-oriented on this album.”
Artwork and layout on “Green Lands” are by Pierre; band photos by Thomas Grember. The band toured France through summer and autumn 2025 โ Mariposa Festival in Angoulรชme, Bordeaux’s Polacabana, Bailleul (Zwarteberg), Nancy, Strasbourg, and a Bรฉthune date at Thรฉรขtre de Poche supporting Bruit โค โ and closed out the year with a five-date November run opening for Slow Crush and Keep, through Lyon (O Totem Live), Toulouse (Le Rex), Bordeaux (Sortie 13), Nantes (Le Ferrailleur) and Paris (Backstage by the Mill). “Green Lands” is out April 24th.
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