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Foie Gras' Droney New Single Simmers With Bloody Foreboding

"Red Moon" is the heavy first single from an EP out later in 2018 on Yellow Year Records.

The songwriter Foie Gras has long made stretched out, gnarled songs that exist somewhere at the tortured borders between drone, noise, doom metal, and shoegaze. The music she makes is almost invariably slow, loud, and sad, but it's multidimensional too; she once made the distinction that a song wasn't about pain, but, borrowing a turn of phrase from a French dominatrix, said it was "about how to suffer beautifully, like Saint Sebastian." This is to say not that that song wasn't heavy too, but that the pitch-blackness hides unseen depths. Her music isn't a reflection of something so simple as sadness, but a dark prism that refracts those feelings, showing the ways that joy and beauty are intertwined with them.

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So, it's incredibly exciting that after mostly hanging in the shadows over the last couple of years, she's back today with a new single called "Red Moon." Like her best work, it too is a wonderfully weighty slog, slowly unfurling synthesizer drones, guitars that groan like belt sanders, and foreboding floor tom rhythms. Over the din, she sings a song of reluctant devotion, on a cosmic scale—a love song to forces bigger than herself. It comes to a close with an image of primal energy, ("I killed this with my own two hands and I drug it here for you," she sings). Meanwhile, in the accompanying video, she stares into the camera in a white dress covered in blood, a memento mori if you thought this violent end was just a metaphor.

"Red Moon" will be available to purchase this Friday. It's an appropriately portentous return for Foie Gras and apparently comes in advance of a new EP, due later in 2018 on Yellow Year Records). You'll want to watch it below.