Ravage, mon amour

Novelists are the five of them, and with singer Camille Contreras and the new single “Ravage” they have pulled off something that in metal almost counts as high treason, yet lends the genre a freshness you rarely get to hear: they sound like pop without ever getting quieter.

There is a line you hear in rehearsal rooms more often than “Who took the last beer?”, and it goes like this: there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. It is usually credited to Duke Ellington, sometimes to Louis Armstrong, and both would have had every right to say it. Leonard Bernstein, too, held that there is no such thing as light or serious music. Back when I still sat behind the drum kit for a living, that was as comfortable as it was brutally demanding. You did not have to decide whether you were playing rock, funk or jazz. You just had to be good at all of them. Easier said than played. But at heart it is true from both sides. From the stage and toward the stage, because tastes differ, but craft and expertise are not really up for debate.

Nobody warns you about the flip side of this job beforehand. Anyone who has made music professionally for years never hears innocently again. You hear music differently. You hear the click in the headphones, the nudged bass drum, the vocal take the studio just bent into shape. You end up co-producing in your head after the fact, whether you want to or not. Enthusiasm becomes a rarity, roughly like the Michelin-starred chef who, sitting in a restaurant, tastes the flaw in the demi-glace instead of enjoying it. So not much knocks me over anymore. For a few days now that has been different, and the blame lies with five people from Paris.

Novelists were founded in 2013 by the brothers Amael and Florestan Durand, one on drums, the other on guitar. Add Nicolas Delestrade on bass, Pierre Danel on second guitar and, since September 2023, Camille Contreras on the mic. On paper this is progressive metalcore. In practice it is a band that cares about pigeonholes about as much as the proverbial Viennese café waiter cares about your hurry.

“Ravage” came out on 3 September, a good four minutes long, and what happens in those four minutes is really music history in fast-forward. There is a groove that bows to Meshuggah, the Swedish inventors of the rhythmically knotted riff. There is a funk in the guitars that smells more of the dance floor than the mosh pit. There is a chorus as sticky as only format radio usually manufactures, with “Hey! Hey!” growls that sound like a stadium. And right in the middle, perfectly matter-of-fact, a baroque cello, as if Johann Sebastian Bach had wandered into the metal rehearsal room and decided to stay. The band says themselves that they kept pushing the song, harder, more melodic, wilder, until the cello felt like the most natural thing in the world.

And then there is the jazz you do not notice right away. Florestan Durand and Pierre Danel, the latter formerly of the French prog band Kadinja, play riffs in the djent idiom, that dry, palm-muted, rhythmically interlocked playing on low-tuned strings, named onomatopoeically after its own sound. The solos, though, have something bluesy about them, and my ear hears the jazz schooling in them: phrases that breathe, notes you deliberately bend a touch out of true, rests as important as the notes before them, and runs that could just as well have come from Frank Gambale in Chick Corea’s Electric Band. Treat the guitar like a precision tool and you quickly end up with the Texans Polyphia. Let it sing and you eventually land back at Ellington. Novelists manage both in the same minute. And that is incredibly impressive.

Anyone who spends a lot of time in cars knows the difference between an old manual gearbox and a dual-clutch. With one you feel every shift, there is a brief pause where nothing pulls. With the other the next gear is already waiting while the current one is still working, and the thrust never breaks off. Most bands that blend genres and cross pop with metal shift like a Lada from the eighties: chorus, clutch, crash, breakdown. Novelists shift dual-clutch. Classical, jazz, funk and pop are already pre-selected while the metal is still pulling, and the shift is as precise as the PDK gearbox of a Porsche GT3 RS, which is why the leap from earworm into the abyss feels like acceleration.

The gearbox in this band is obviously called Camille. Her biography reads as if someone had designed the perfect singer for exactly this music on a drawing board and then realised she already existed. As a child she learned cello and piano, later screamed in a hardcore band, then sang in a pop duo, and she has a classical dance training on top. That is where the hooks come from, those short melodic barbs the ear snags on, and that is also where the scream comes from, the one that tears it all down again a second later. She is the band’s third voice in ten years, after Matteo Gelsomino and Tobias Rische, and it is exactly this kind of change that usually destroys bands. The trade press wrote back then that Camille had saved Novelists. I would rather say: she is the one who finally completed them.

Then the visuals. Metal videos are traditionally a manageable art form: warehouse, flying sparks, slow motion, somebody shakes their hair, little light, lots of darkness. The video for “Ravage” was directed by Bastien Sablé, who otherwise works for the French pop star Aya Nakamura among others, and the concept comes from Camille herself. Choreography, a visual language out of the pop world, a sense of form that thinks more of a fashion editorial than a festival ground. The budget for a big production company would have been there; the band still shouldered most of it themselves so the money would stretch further. People call that obsession, and it is a pleasure to watch.

Now the drummer in me speaks up. A few years ago a critic noted that the drumming in Novelists was merely the backbone. To anyone who has ever sat behind a kit, that sounds like a compliment. In this music the bass drum has to land exactly with the guitars, beat for beat, syncopation for syncopation, and the slightest blur makes the whole structure wobble like a house of cards in a hairdryer. Very often metal drum tracks are extremely complicated and feel as if they are not quite embedded in the whole of a song. Amael’s drumming is no less complex, but it does not feel that way at all. Only when you listen twice or three or four times do you become aware of the complexity of this drum track. Amael puts his ego behind the song and makes the foundation so solid that everyone else can dance on top. And on “Ravage” even the cello dances. And sure, in the studio you can bend all of this into shape, but Novelists deliver live what they promise digitally, and anyone who knows me knows I have not said that about a band in a very long time.

The accompanying album “CODA” already came out in May 2025, on the band’s own label ACKOR Music. Some reviewers found the metalcore formula on it occasionally predictable, others handed out the top mark. Sure, the formula is visible. But a Wiener Schnitzel is a formula too: meat, flour, egg and breadcrumbs, and yet worlds lie between the convenience schnitzel out of the deep fryer and the one where the breading soufflés away from the meat. With “Ravage”, it soufflés.

The world is catching on right now. Hellfest, Graspop, Download, tours through the USA, Europe and China, in October a European run with The Devil Wears Prada that also stopped at the Simm City in Vienna on 12 October. On 23 April 2027 they play the Olympia in Paris, the biggest headline show of their career, in the hall where Piaf once stood. I will go right out on a limb: Novelists are my discovery of the year, and “Ravage” is the best thing I have heard in years. If this line-up stays together, a career lies ahead of this band that will make the Olympia look like the warm-up lap.

So Duke Ellington was right, or Armstrong, or Bernstein, or whoever said it first. There are only two kinds of music. Novelists clearly play the one kind, and they play several genres of it at once.

Novelists: single “Ravage” (ACKOR Music, 2026), album “CODA” (2025), live on 23 April 2027 at the Olympia, Paris. www.novelists.store