Ici d’ailleurs – 12th December 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Woah, what? Is that really how it’s supposed to start? Hitting play on Dééfait’s eponymous debut EP and landing with ‘We Love Each Other We Don’t Belong to Any Species Anymore’ feels like crashing in midway through a song: there’s no intro, everything is already happening. And there’s a lot happening. It’s chaotic, lurching explosions of noise erupting through tidal waves of cacophony and discord, frenzied fretwork and spuming mania and derangement are everywhere here, to the point that you wonder if you’ve arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, and downloaded the wrong files while you were about it. But no: welcome to the weird world of Dééfait
Their bio summarises their sound quite nicely as ‘Somewhere between krautrock, noise rock, decaying psychedelia, and pagan proto-punk’, adding that ‘Dééfait makes music as one performs a ritual: in trance, on repeat, and without a safety net. From the chaotic arteries of Mexico City to the basement venues of the Paris suburbs, Dééfait sculpts noise rock in a state of breathless tension. Their self-titled debut EP is a noise rite: a wall of guitars, incantatory percussion, and possessed voices. With Dééfait, sound twists, repeats, stretches, until exhaustion and ecstasy.’
And yes, this is all true. Dééfait transport the listener into another world, a different space, another time, where you don’t even know what space you’re in or what time it is, what year or even millennia you’re in. The warping, twisting trudge of ‘Molokh ’ is an epic, drifting desert-rock wandering into weirdness.
‘BONDNONDOND’ is a roiling rocker, the context and lyrical content aren’t easy to comprehend, but this I no way detracts from the ability to appreciate the song, which reminds me of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. I have no idea what it’s actually about, but it’s a tempestuous aural blizzard which transports the listener on a rising tide which threatens to smash against rocks and deliver annihilation by nature. In contrast, ‘Comatose Big Sun’ is a classic example of 90s indie inspired shuffling jingle with psychedelia interwoven into the dense, droning texture. Ride and Chapterhouse are in the blend when it comes to touchstones here, but so do The Black Angels. They use a similar template for ‘Al’Ether’, but here, everything’s cranked up to ten, a wail of distortion swirls around the rolling rhythm section, and the whole thing goes off the rails in a blast of raucous jazz noise on the last song, ‘Wow! Ferreri Cooked for Us’. Wow indeed.
This isn’t so much an EP as a voyage of discovery.
AA
Aural Aggravation 