The sixth incantation and fourth album of Turpitude arrives not as a cautious continuation, but as a burnished rebirth, glinting as oxidised gold pulled from the soil. Alice Simard’s solo project once again reshapes itself, drawing threads from past records while hardening them into something leaner and ultimately fiercer.

Where “Subalterne” shimmered with chromatic restlessness and sly rhythmic flirtations, “Mordoré” tightens its grip around a rawer black metal path that recalls the project’s earliest eruptions. The guitars scrape and scald yet never truly monochrome, since beneath the abrasive chaos, faint iridescent hues flicker, as mineral veins exposed by erosion. Percussion moves with a subtle, almost mischievous elasticity, not overtly funky, but alive with small deviations where the bass also helps, adopting occasionally quite syncopated patterns

While the production chooses the harsher side, the sound itself is thick and tacitly close, as if the listener were pressed against the amplifiers themselves, feeling the vibration through the body rather than merely hearing it. Basslines loom and coil beneath the guitar assault, lending the music a malleability that anchors its more volatile passages.

Stylistically, “Mordoré” stands at a crossroads between its feral origins and post black. There is a renewed sense of propulsion, a stride that surfaces most clearly in moments of ascension, black metal rendered not solely as lament or desolation, but as resolute forward motion. Hints of triumphant melodicism surface without softening the blow, echoing the grandeur of acts as Vicarivs Filii Dei or Eisenwinter, though filtered through Turpitude’s distinctly Québécois prism, definitely colder and more intimate.

“Mordoré” feels as a necessary reassertion, a return sharpened by experience, where past experiments are neither disowned nor indulged, but distilled. Even if it may not shout for attention as loudly as Simard’s other endeavours, its strength lies precisely in that refusal.