Hiver Mental

Available in June 2026

Hiver Mental is an island that has emerged, a stone in the icy seas, for eyes with tightened hearts
*** Saphi

Nine years have passed without any Nocturne album being released. 
Total silence, apart from concerts and a few appearances on various compilations: no new production had emerged. 
Led by Saphi for over three decades now, Nocturne has never been set aside or put on hold. 
Quite the opposite. 
Studio work is a daily, relentless practice, without any interruption. 
In short, it is a discipline in its own right. 
Continuously pursuing a sonic and musical language constantly questioned through practice, concerts, and encounters, it has reached what one might call a form of culmination, though it is more accurately the logical continuation of a persistent body of work carried out over several decades. 
Here, there is no turning back: no need to look over one’s shoulder. 
We are at the source of continuity, as can be heard across the thirteen tracks that make up this new album entitled HIVER MENTAL.

The album, begun in 2018, was completed in December 2025: we are dealing with a long process in which nothing is left to chance. 
The tone is noise-based and openly hostile. 
“Precise, meticulous, surgical”: this is how one might describe the core of the formula upon which the tracks are built. Short-form pieces — 2 minutes for the shortest, never exceeding 4:30 — give the record a distinct rhythm. 
Yet it is not duration that matters here, but the intensity with which the pieces imprint themselves on the mind, like light on the retina. 
The tracks blend ambient and noise. 
Some compositions, more electronic in nature, combined with the highly precise manipulations of these noisers — homemade instruments — as well as spoken voices, generate, on certain pieces, a sense of extreme tension, of threat, provoking anxiety and unease, even a fear ready to collapse onto you like a brutal winter in a mild season.

Hiver Mental is first and foremost an image born in the intimacy of thought, where the first conflicts emerge before extending outward toward others. 
Nocturne offers a vision of the world as it is, without optimism, where death becomes almost secondary in the face of the silence of the living — it, at least, is real. 
To move through the shadows, to write one’s name in earth, water, or air: nothing remains, and it is beautiful. Within this ephemerality lies something deeper than forgetting: the persistence of this void. 
Even within the poetics of emptiness, an escape still seems possible — but here there is none. 
The crisis has settled for good. There is no inside and no outside, no place left to shelter or protect oneself. 
The threat is everywhere and begins within.

No more silence, no peace. It is over.
Nocturne is an image of our time.
*** Saphi 18 Avril 2026

CD comes in 6 panel Digipak.
Recorded between 2018 - 2025

Tracklist:
Automne
Amerailleurs
Ecochaos
Partir
Tout doit Disparaitre
Tumulte
Hiver
Monitoring
Noir! Noir! Noir!
Bienvenue
Far Away
La Vie - La Rage - La Mort

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