UNTITLED WITH DRUMS have been at this since 2014 and have never been in a hurry. Their debut album Hollow arrived 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. Every write-up about this band leans on their Hellfest 2022 slot, and that was the Valley stage at half past ten in the morning. They put it plainly themselves back then: "Nous n'avons jamais voulu faire de la musique notre métier." We never wanted to make music our profession.
Made Flesh is their second album, and the first that sounds like money was spent on it. Rémy D. Perrin's drums sound like drums in a room. Nothing is clipped or squashed flat. The guitars are where the real thinking went. Lucas Delay plays hard but never fills the frame, and he stays out of the middle of the song. All ten tracks are arranged 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. UNTITLED WITH DRUMS went the other way, and it is the best decision on the album. 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 mostly on the device that era was built from, clean spacious verse into distorted chorus. They open by reversing it. "Above My Head" starts on a big catchy riff and then drops into verses that are quiet and dark. After that the record settles into the familiar shape. "Space" is the longest track at 4:57 and the centre of the album, bright and patient until the choruses come in under distortion with Le Borgne pushing harder. "Been So High" does the same job in three minutes with near-acoustic verses, the most straightforwardly grunge thing here.
The songwriting carries it. Ten tracks built the same way still come out sounding like ten different songs, and the choruses stick after two or three listens. At 38:44 with nothing over five minutes, no track outlasts its idea. "Matter" is one of the best things here and an obvious choice for a first single. "Shame" is the emotional high point, direct and heavy, with echoing clean guitars running underneath it. "Oblivious" is the one that breaks pattern, coming in fast and grungy and then taking the tempo apart, the slow-downs landing in the chorus where this kind of song normally speeds up and hits harder. It is the cleverest writing on the album. The record ends where it began, on heavy riffs, with "Cry" closing on guitars bent into a siren wail.
Twelve years in, with no need for any of it to pay, UNTITLED WITH DRUMS have written ten songs that hold up. 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. They know this music and they clearly love it. They sound even better on the moments they step outside it, and "Oblivious" suggests there is more of that to come.