Acclaimed French post-punk band Rendez Vous (RDV) are excited to kick off a fall North American tour this October and November as they continue to support their critically praised new album Downcast.
Rolling Stone France lauded “its dark and noisy brilliance, sometimes very high tempos, and shoegaze riffs,” while Stereogum summed up the record with the simple but apt phrase “Gnarly”.
The upcoming dates will see the group playing headline gigs across the US And Canada, with festival plays including Levitation Festival in Austin, TX, Sanctum Fest in Chicago, IL.
Tickets are on sale now and a full list of upcoming North American tour dates can be found below.
Listen to the new album Downcast: https://bfan.link/downcast
Music fans last found Rendez Vous in January 2020, wrapping up a tour of over 120 dates around the world with a sold out show at La Cigale in Paris.
Today, we encounter RDV again in 2024 with their new album Downcast, and the first observation that arises is that the dial has shifted -towards extremes.
The highly effective post-punk anthems have given way to tracks of barely contained rage (“Sheer,” “Dye and Retry”); simultaneously, RDV significantly slows down the tempo on a good portion of their new songs and establishes a new atmosphere that we hadn’t seen from them before.
We discover a band just as capable of delving into the most relentless harshness as of producing pieces of great melancholic beauty (“Nothing,” “Smoke ‘Em Heads”), and therein lies the strength of this album. RDV has chosen to go against the trajectory one might have expected from them: 50% of (very) enraged tracks, 50% heart-wrenching pieces -the mid-tempo tracks often flirt with ballads and heartfelt cries.
We didn’t know RDV was capable of moving us to this extent (“The House Has Burned Down”), and the discovery is a happy one.
The other major change to note in RDV’s sound is a step forward in the reference decade: abandoning its synthetic elements, the group has released a record that bears the presence of Frank Black, the Smashing Pumpkins, shoegaze, and grunge -one could even ascertain a nod to Deftones.
However, don’t see this as any hint of nostalgic pastiche: Downcast is a pure product of its time, laying down markers for the years to come. Even though guitars have replaced synthesizers, the record is punctuated with glitches and digital distortions, and the group surrounds itself with nightmarish visuals, which aesthetically extend the emotional disruption conveyed by its music.
Downcast is an exercise in transcribing the violence of the world in the midst of the 2020s, modern in its hybrid nature, like a life-and-death struggle between human and machine -two enemy brothers seeking to embrace each other as much as to suffocate one another.
