On his fifth album under the name Igorrr, French composer Gautier Serre explores the eternal struggle between good and evil through his own avant-garde mix of black metal, baroque music, industrial, and trip-hop. Featuring an international cast of virtuoso musicians led by drummer Rémi Serafino, mezzo-soprano Marthe Alexandre, and a 15-person choir, Amen also boasts guest appearances from Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle (on “Blastbeat Falafel”) and Scott Ian of Anthrax (on “Mustard Mucous”). In addition to traditional metal and classical instrumentation, Serre incorporates unconventional instruments like theremin and dungchen—a nine-foot Tibetan trumpet (on “Infestis”)—alongside non-instrument noisemakers including an anvil, a giant saw blade, and even an excavator (on “Headbutt”). “For me, the word ‘amen’ has a couple of different meanings,” he tells Apple Music when asked about the album title. “It’s a reference to the amen break from jungle and breakbeat, a track with a break inside that’s pitched and sped up. The amen break is an important part of my musical journey that’s opened a lot of doors. On top of that, ‘amen’ of course has a spiritual meaning. One of the colors I like to have in Igorrr is sacred music, baroque and classical. This is another important part of my musical journey.” Below, Serre details each track, often with a synesthetic description. “Daemoni” “This is very much an evil track. For me, as a synesthetic person, it has very much a red color in the sound. The evil distortion fades into a brutal industrial track—really heavy, really dark. This part of the track morphs into traditional baroque voices and classical guitar, the kind of melodic track I often do in Igorrr. This leads to the third section, an explosive part with a very black-metal riff at the end.” “Headbutt” “I always loved the piano as an instrument, and I am a big fan of Chopin. I wanted to do something with his influence, but I didn’t want to do a symphonic metal track. This is more like a virtuoso classic color of piano joined together with death metal. It turned the piano into a rhythmic instrument. I called it ‘Headbutt’ because, initially, the last notes was me giving a headbutt to the piano keys. But then, I wanted to make the track stronger, more forceful. There was an excavator in the garden, and I thought, ‘Let’s try it.’ I actually filmed the moment we did this, and you see it in the video for the song.” “Limbo” “I think this track has been the longest in the process because I started writing it during the first lockdown of the pandemic. For me, ‘Limbo’ is the battle between the good and the bad—the good being the classical guitar and the wonderful female vocals. Then there is this wave of negativity that comes back into your life, and you’re trying to keep your head above water all the time. That’s what happens in the second half of the track when the singer sings during the metal parts. We can feel that she’s singing with her head just over the water and everything else is negativity and brutality, the endless battle between the good and the bad.” “Blastbeat Falafel” “I’m a big fan of metal, and I’m a big fan of Asian music, but they obviously do not join together easily. This track tries to find the common points between both of these excellent worlds. It started with a stupid riff with an uncommon time signature. When we played in Mesa, Arizona, we met Trey Spruance, and we spent the night talking about music and drinking beers. I played him the badly recorded guitar riff on my phone, and he said he really loved it. A couple of months later, I sent him a more advanced version of the track, and he recorded his part. It sounds marvelous.” “ADHD” “It’s an adventurous track. The subject is a condition that many people around me have, and so I try to talk about this with music. It starts with dots of color in the white, in the silence. It’s easy music at first. Then it starts to create a rhythm that you’re not supposed to understand at the beginning. You think it’s random. It’s the expression of a simple idea that seems difficult if you can’t think about it correctly, like ADHD people. But then it gets crazier and crazier, very complex. There are many ideas everywhere, many little details. It took me years to mix it perfectly. At the end, there’s a headbang-able riff, and if you put headphones on and turn it up, you can hear the drummer screaming in the chaos.” “2020” “This short track is dissonant, not nice to hear. It’s chaotic and unpleasant, just like the year 2020 for me and many others. It’s the perfect expression of how I felt then.” “Mustard Mucous” “This track has the technical vibe I call ‘ninja metal.’ It’s really hard to play with the drums and guitar, with opposite notes really fast and changing position pretty often. The track is very heavy and well-produced, so I wanted to add something that was the opposite of that. I played a recorder, the least heavy instrument on Earth. I don’t know how to play flutes, so I decided to do it and not correct it, to have the bad to contrast the good. On top of that, Scott Ian from Anthrax plays on the track. I didn’t ask him at first because I was afraid he would say no.” “Infestis” “The track is something I wanted to do for years. It has the cinematic vibe in the sound design and very black-metal vibes. We also used the dungchen, a huge Himalayan trumpet used for ceremonies and stuff, so it has a very spiritual color. The one I used, if I remember, was like five meters. I mixed in some analog distortion to keep it together and give it a point of view that was something darker than just metal.” “Ancient Sun” “The form of this track is much more like a trip-hop track than a metal track. It’s an easy way to exit from ‘Infestis’ because it’s the same color. After the chaos of ‘Infestis,’ you feel you are still underground. You don’t see the light. It has that feeling of having no positive vibe that you can see. ‘Ancient Sun’ gives a really nice breath of fresh air for the album. And I used traditional voices for the track, not baroque voices, because it’s much more human, more grounded in the earth.” “Pure Disproportionate Black and White Nihilism” “I recorded this track in the normal way for Igorrr, but I used an anvil to smash the snare drum to get that metallic tail. So, you hear the drum and then, one millisecond later, you hear the metallic resonance of the anvil. On this track, you will also hear the giant saw blade that I use as a gong. It talks about when you are surrounded by people who don’t understand that you feel the things around you very, very intensely. Sometimes you need a giant let-go, and this track is something you can use to liberate yourself from all the negativity around you.” “Étude n°120” “It’s a little piece of baroque music that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. If you get through to this point of the album, well done—here’s a nice little gift. It’s the perfect link between ‘Disproportionate’ and the last track, ‘Silence.’” “Silence” “This is the death of the album. You can hear the beauty and the beast, the good and the bad. You have this beautiful piano and beautiful voice that get along together perfectly. It's very harmonic, very well-in-tune, very beautiful. The strings around it make it even more united and balanced. Then the drums start, and you feel something is wrong: Why is there so much noise? For me, the song symbolizes the disease that we find pretty often in this world: Beauty doesn’t last long. There is always something to break it.”