Interviews About Albums: Arbre-dieu - Nuit Noire (2025)

In this new interview, we sat down with the French Occult Black Metal band, Arbre-dieu, to ask questions about their album "Nuit Noire". 

1. What can you say about this new EP/CD?

Nuit noire is the first manifestation of Arbre-dieu — a work composed between 2022 and 2025. It’s a four-part descent, deliberately raw, instinctive and primitive. You can call it Raw Black Metal to give a rough idea, but the project reaches beyond genre conventions — that’s why I’m promoting it as an Occult Black Metal production. It seeks to channel ritual intensity and essential violence, not technical display, turning inner collapse into sound.

2. What is the meaning of the EP/CD name?

Nuit noire refers to the Nuit noire de l’âme — the Dark Night of the Soul. It’s an initiatory plunge: the moment when everything collapses, when perception fractures, and you’re forced to confront your own darkness and your own fear of dying. It also echoes the Maison-Dieu from the Tarot of Marseille — shock, revelation, the mark left after the fall. The EP follows that arc: you enter the night, you’re broken open by it, and you emerge transformed.

3. Which one is the composer of the CD/EP?

The entire EP was composed and produced by Adz (Thy Apokalypse, Kaamosmasennus, Reflecting the Light, Salaman Isku). It’s a solitary project — everything comes from the same impulse, the same need to confront and shape this inner violence. But composition is only one part of it. The audio and visual work are just as essential. Buck., as the sound engineer, pushed the music further into violence and darkness, while D. Gauthier, as the visual artist, created the stark black-and-white artwork that defines the record’s identity. These two collaborators brought the EP to another level.

4. If you had to pick one song, which one would you pick?

Musically, I would probably pick The Seeds of Madness (Les graines de la folie). It’s the track where the trip intensifies: the music gradually rises into full violence, marking the start of the initiatory bad trip, where fear and pain take over.

5. Is there a special message in this EP/CD? If there is, what is it?

It’s less a message than a passage. The EP urges you not to turn away from what terrifies you, but to go through it, letting burn what must burn. Sometimes destruction is the clearing needed for something new to rise. Nuit noire is about transformation through confronting your own darkness. It doesn’t prettify pain, but traverses it, guiding the listener from fear and suffering to a simple, strange joy — emerging changed, as if reborn.

6. Are there some lyrics that you'd love to share?

The lyrics are in French, and the EP is mostly instrumental (2 out of 4 tracks). It focuses on the internal process of confronting the fear of dying (track 1, Les graines de la folie) and the connection with spirits that come to “heal” while the trip becomes slightly less harsh (track 3, La vieille femme et le soleil pâle / The Old Lady and the Pale Sun). Between these, an instrumental track (track 2, Troubillon chaotique / Chaotic Maelstrom) depicts the peak of the bad trip, while the final track serves as a funeral-like piece, representing the death and rebirth of the traveler.

7. Which inspirations have been important for this album? Musically, or people you’d like to thank?

Musically, the initial idea was to create raw, old-school Black Metal, but as the thematic concept of the EP emerged, the music evolved to match it more closely. The inspiration comes more from states of consciousness than from other artists: fear, dissolution, and the strange clarity that appears when you think you’re dying — that’s the real fuel. Symbolically, the Tarot (especially the Maison-Dieu), certain plant spirits, and the raw immediacy of early Black Metal have all shaped the work. As for thanks, this EP is solitary, but born from the shadows of people who mattered, whose presence or absence pushed the journey forward.

8. Something to add?

Nuit noire isn’t meant to be comfortable. It’s an experience to inhabit, a trial to cross. If it leaves a mark — even a small one — then it has done its job. Thanks for the interview.