There are records that you don’t just listen to, but that draw you into a whirlwind of emotions. Le sang des pierres, the second full-length by French Screamo/Post-Hardcore band Gros Enfant Mort, is a record that doesn’t seek to convey beauty and comfort, but rather genuine raw emotions to be appreciated and embraced.
If you receive a suggestion from the Veil of Sound crew you should listen to it. Well, my distraction turned to an interesting discovery and it’s what we’ll talking about today. It’s difficult to keep track of every name and every piece of advice that comes up in the chat every day, but when you manage to do so, you make some interesting discoveries.
Gros Enfant Mort (“Dead Big Child”) are a Screamo/Post-Hardcore band from Poitiers, France. Initially conceived as a solo-project, it quickly evolved into a full live band, releasing their debut EP in 2019 and their first LP in 2022.
In January 2026, the band released Le sang de pierres, an abrasive record that seems to come directly from the emotional breakdown that has generated it. As we can hear throughout record, the emotions that it purveys are dark but seek the light: depression, isolation and mental health have built this music alongside the deconstruction of social norms, performance pressure and the illusion of manufactured happiness.
Alexis, the project founder, said of this record: “It speaks to the insidious way depression takes hold and gradually cuts us off from others, even though so many are living through the same despair, just at different scales. I wrote it because, at rock bottom, when even the simplest things feel out of reach, sometimes there’s only one thread left to hold on to. For me, that thread was this: writing, composing. Not to beautify. Not to heal. But to bear witness.”
The nine-track album opens with “Cloué au sol” (“Pinned to the floor”): a piano intro followed by a reverberated and soft voice introduces us to the themes of the record: “J’en ai vu une trentaine / et pourtant certains hivers / ne finissent jamais.” (“I have seen about thirty of them, and yet some winters never end.”), after the intro, where the voices start to raise in a climax, we’re blown away from the massive sounds.
“Saigne! Saigne! Saigne!” (“Bleed! Bleed! Bleed!”) opens with a guitar arpeggio that breaks into the verse. This song maintains a constant intensity, but varies suddenly leaving you in limbo from which it seems you will be able to escape, but it is not yet time.
Songs like “Châteaux de cartes” (“House of cards”) and “Étranger à la Terre” (“Stranger to Earth”) are probably the songs that best represent the band’s compositional ability, managing to balance emotional tension with a Post-Hardcore approach.
All the songs on this record are well-crafted and are able to deliver in a clear way what Alexis meant to say, even if you don’t understand French. The closing song is the title track, “Le sang de pierres” (“The blood of stones”), and it was the one on the album that I liked the most. A great conclusion of this album, with probably the most emotional song which captures the mood of the album; the song starts slowly with a slightly distorted guitar arpeggio and the voice screaming in contrast to the tranquillity of the guitars: in the second part of the song the mood explodes and brings to the conclusion of the record: “J’ai assez souffert, je suis prêt à vivre, / et mes séquelles me voleront pas le sourire / Les cieux se déchaînent au dessus des ruines, / et le sang des pierres coulera encore dans le vide. / Encore dans le vide. / Encore en vie.” (“I have suffered enough, I am ready to live, / and my scars will not steal my smile. / The heavens rage above the ruins, / and the blood of the stones will flow again into the void. / Again into the void. / Still alive.”).
