Fireproof Sweat

Fireproof Sweat picks up the torch from the group’s second album, Vivéré (2016, La République des Granges), though where Vivéré fights and shouts, Fireproof Sweat wonders what for. “Ten years ago, a fire took the lives of four of our friends on rue Myrha in Paris, just a few months after Urs Graf Consort was founded. One of them — Nicolas Millet, a magnificent bookseller and Félix Fénéon specialist — was meant to be our bassist. The title Fireproof Sweat, and the album as a whole, questions how surviving the death of friends — outliving collective dynamics that death puts an end to — can carry with it the fear of betraying who we used to be, the fear of gradually losing our freedom. Vivéré, whose tracks were written both before and after that fire, was about fighting and shouting to stay vibrant with the will to live that preceded the crime. Fireproof Sweat, written after the mourning had passed, is its cerebral and anguished counterpart — about