When Slift announced their new, fourth album, they promised it’ll contain way shorter tracks than before, which felt tantamount to Usain Bolt promising to cut his own legs off. Since the Frenchmen went surprisingly viral via a KEXP live session during the pandemic, they’ve specialised in increasingly widescreen space rock, pulling metal, krautrock and even jazz into their heady galaxy, up to 15 minutes at a time.
Their vastness has become key to their identity, particularly during the many, many live shows they play each year, where they add hallucinogenic video to the mix and convey the same delirium as the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fantasia’s opening title track is the only song with a run-time that could have belonged on its near-feature-length predecessor Ilion, but it lands with a heaviness hitherto unmatched.
It’s a flurry of crushing chords, albeit every bit as out-there as usual, thanks to the dizzying synth lines and singer/guitarist Jean Fossat’s alien vocals. Corrupted Sky follows in a cosmic boogie, Rémi Fossat’s bass rumbling as drummer Canek Flores lays down a hypnotic groove.
From there, no two songs are exactly alike, but they combine into a mind-warping whole. The Village is five minutes of rising tension, the music building into a cacophony which belies the fact this band are just three members strong. Ominous post-rocker Waiting Man sets the stage for The Day Of Execution: a metallic stampede that lets Flores, and Jean’s tapping hand, off the lead.
The songs may be briefer, but Fantasia in its entirety takes everything great about Slift and revs it harder. It’s a trip to Titan and back that takes less than an hour, without missing any of the stops along the way. Expect their already-soaring career to rocket even further after this.
Fantasia is out on Friday, June 5, via Sub Pop. This review was first published in the new issue of Metal Hammer, which you can order now and get delivered directly to your doorstep.
