Our review of "Made Flesh", the second album by UNTITLED WITH DRUMS, is now live — and we gave it an 8.5/10. The record arrives this Friday, August 21, via Season Of Mist.
The Clermont-Ferrand band have been at this since 2014 and have never been in a hurry. Debut album "Hollow" landed in March 2020, days before France locked down, and still made best-of-year lists; the "symbols" EP followed in 2025, by which point the five-piece had become a quartet. They said it plainly themselves years ago: "Nous n'avons jamais voulu faire de la musique notre métier." We never wanted to make music our profession.
"Made Flesh" is the first of their records that sounds like money was spent on it. Rémy D. Perrin's drums sound like drums in a room, and nothing is clipped or squashed flat. But the real thinking went into the guitars: Lucas Delay plays hard and still stays out of the middle of the song, so Martin Le Borgne's voice carries the melody and the weight arrives around it. Bands in this bracket usually pile on density and bury the singer — going the other way is the best decision on the album, and Nicolas Zalachas's synths take the room that leaves instead of fighting for it.
The record is very 2000: alternative rock and post-hardcore played straight, running on clean spacious verse into distorted chorus, though the opener "Above My Head" reverses it. Ten tracks built the same way still come out sounding like ten different songs, and at 38:44 with nothing over five minutes, no track outlasts its idea. "Matter" was an obvious choice for a first single, "Shame" is the emotional high point, and "Oblivious" is the cleverest writing here — coming in fast and grungy, then taking the tempo apart so the slow-downs land in the chorus, where this kind of song normally speeds up and hits harder.
If that era of alternative rock is your territory and you want to hear it played like a living thing rather than a period piece, this will do it — and the moments where they step outside it suggest there is more to come.