There is a wormhole somewhere in the uncharted wasteland between experimental metal, noise rock, and electroacoustics—a swirling, howling abyss of fractured sound and controlled chaos.
Step too close, and it will drag you in. Toru built that wormhole. And now, they’re back to making it bigger, louder, and much weirder.
Formed in 2019, the French instrumental trio—Arthur Arsenne, Héloïse Francesconi, and Nicolas Brisset—smashes through boundaries of noise like a runaway freight train made of scrap metal and bad decisions.
Their self-titled 2020 debut was a headfirst dive into sonic entropy: a snarling fusion of jazz, metal, minimalism, and free improv as if John Zorn and Meshuggah got stuck in a collapsing supernova.
Now comes Velours Dévorant, an album that bends into impossible shapes and sets it on fire. Recorded in 2023 with Nicolas Dick (Kill The Thrill), the new record is a black hole of unpredictable textures, violently tight execution, and transcendental noise. It’s an album that grabs you by the skull and rattles your frontal lobe until your teeth vibrate.
Velours Dévorant is the sound of a power trio caught in an interdimensional riptide, flinging themselves from molten noise-jazz eruptions to angular prog odysseys with zero regard for convention.
It opens with “VHS,” a sludgy, distortion-drenched onslaught of odd time signatures sharp enough to give Opeth nightmares.
Then there’s “Vermeilles,” where propulsive prog melodies crash headfirst into a swarm of rumbling, apocalyptic noise-jazz. “Voiles” is a mangled, hypnotic death dance in which guitars screech, bend, and scream.
The title track, “Velours Dévorant,” is thirteen minutes of blissed-out free jazz, shrieking avant-garde dissonance, and bone-crushing doom—somewhere between Melvins and a malfunctioning spaceship.
With a sound that defies gravity and a lineup that spans Marseille, Nice, and Lyon, Toru is an unhinged force in France’s thriving prog underground.
Where others lean into ‘60s psych nostalgia, Toru obliterates the past and builds something feral from the rubble.
Released on January 14th, the record finds its home on a constellation of labels spanning the globe: WV Sorcerer Production (FR & China), Bagdaddy Records (NL), Cruel Nature Records (UK), Aktiver Aufstand in Plastik (GER), Arsenis Solaris, Araki Records, and Day Off Records (FR). Enjoy!
Check out Velours Dévorant by Toru on Bandcamp here.
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