Some bands go on hiatus. Chevreuil basically disappeared into the ether. The two-decade silence might have been exactly what a record like ‘Stadium’ needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The French guitar-and-drums duo \u2014 Julien F. on what they lovingly call “magnetic drums” and Tony C. on “magnetic guitar” \u2014 first formed in 1998 after meeting at an art school in Nantes. They never really thought of themselves as a band in the conventional sense. More like a performative installation. A living sculpture that happened to be incredibly loud. Tony’s guitar routed through four amplifiers arranged around Julien’s kit created a quadraphonic wall of sound, while Julien’s unmic’d 1976 Ludwig (built the same year they were both born, as fate would have it) kept things raw, physical, and portable. As long as there was one outlet in the room, Chevreuil could set up and destroy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Between 1998 and 2006, they put out four albums and an EP \u2014 including three recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago \u2014 and built a quiet cult following across labels in Paris, Chicago, and Nagoya. Then: silence. Fifteen years of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The comeback wasn’t exactly planned. What started as a conversation about reissuing their back catalog through the innovative French imprint Computer Students™ turned into something bigger. Julien and Tony spent a week together in January 2025 \u2014 recording by day, cooking for each other by night \u2014 testing whether their chemistry still had a pulse. Spoiler: it did. Part of the spark came from an unexpected place: Julien watching his teenage son grind through his first drum lessons, that particular struggle reigniting something in him about why he’d loved the instrument in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result is ‘Stadium’, a 16-track double album and their most conceptually ambitious work yet. The core conditions of their earlier records remain intact \u2014 live recording, unamplified drums, four-amp immersion \u2014 but a reconfigured hybrid electro-acoustic guitar opens up new electronic timbres without disrupting the self-contained nature of their setup. Conceptually, the album draws on the music of the spheres, magnetism, radioactivity, astrometry, and magic as frameworks for exploring vibration and transformation. Each side of the double LP contains four pieces, which can be heard as two separate albums or one long continuum. Every variation across the record comes purely from performance nuance \u2014 the recording settings were kept identical from tracking through mastering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s heady stuff, and it sounds like it. Check out the video for Tartarus<\/em> below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n