After nearly twenty years of silence, Nihil is back at it again, for fun and with as much caution as his metal can be incandescent.
The first step in your comeback was this album, Aphelion, last year, for which you re-recorded your old songs. Do you perceive it a posteriori as a warm-up lap?
Yves Jabo (vocals): That’s exactly it! It was also a way of seeing where we stood between us. As has always been the case before within Nihil, many things bring us together musically, even if all five of us listen to things that are sometimes very far from each other. This is partly why, outsiders, it has always been difficult to “catalogue” Nihil. It’s actually something that we really wanted, even played on. For example, we are classified as metal although, personally, I don't listen to it! It's all a question of emotion, being able to create emotions. This is what has always driven Nihil, since day one. And it's quite moving to find yourself like this, more than fifteen years later, first on a rehearsal, then diving back into old songs to tell yourself that they would still have meaning if we re-recorded them. So yes, a warm-up lap, which opened the way to something new, but which still remains a nest…
The other common point of all this, and Perihelion, the new album is no exception to the rule, is this darkness in the atmospheres, the themes addressed…
A certain form of pessimism has always accompanied us in fact. It's in a way what remained of the post-teens who founded Nihil at the time, a somewhat dark look at society as a whole, at what surrounds us. Even if everyone says that, music serves as an outlet and gives us the opportunity to express our worst nightmares, our fears, our fragilities, our vulnerabilities, and that feels great!
Why did you want to mix Aphelion, a best of therefore, and Perihelion, under a more global “entity” called Syzygy, when they could very well have “lived” independently of each other?
Nihil have always been a concept band, for better or worse, whether visually or textually. Linking the two projects is a way of affirming the continuity of Nihil: the present does not exist without the past. Syzygy therefore presents what we have been, what we are today and what we propose to become. It's the same movement. Syzygy is the technical term for the notion of alignment of the planets, and that is exactly what happened between us to bring Nihil back into existence.
Is Nihil trying to make up for lost time or make the most of the present moment?
We have nothing to catch up on. Nihil had died a beautiful death, having reached the end of his dream. We perceive this return as a gift, and we can never thank Laurent Lefebvre of Base Production enough for putting it in our heads before accompanying it. No pressure. We are going to take our time, see how things are going and consider the future calmly.
You can also check out our interview with Nihil via our reader below:
