Behind The Artworks: Angellore - Nocturnes (2026)

Celin (bass): Like with every Angellore’s album, we wished to work with something unique and tailor-made for this specific collection of songs. Here, we’ve known for a long time what we wanted to go back to the nocturnal tints, the moonlit glades, and the forsaken ruins that were already painted with music in Errances. We wanted to take a step back from the arid mountain of La Litanie Des Cendres and the sombre figure of Rien Ne Devait Mourir, and bathe in something more akin to 19 th century romanticism. Hence the choice of the medium, coming back to painting (even if it’s digital painting) after RNDM’s Polaroid collage. Hence what could be referred to as “romantic tropes”: ruins -reminders of time implacable; the moon -a pale light that also evocates darkness; a sole silhouette lost in the forest -the wanderer, beneath a sea of clouds we’d say, the epitome of the romantic subject.

For what seems quite a long time, this album was without a title (but that’s another story to be told), and thus I wasn’t really sure in which direction I would want the artwork to go. Fortunately, on one of our many bus rides from and to Belgium where we were mixing the album, Walran came up with the definitive title, ‘Nocturnes’. Everything lightened up, and I thought of these ruins, lost in the nightly forest, in the tradition of the old masters - the main inspiration being Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Visitor to a Moonlit Churchyard & Arnold Böcklin’s Mondscheinlandschaft mit Ruin. With all the years it took to finish the mix of the album, one could think I had all the time in the world to achieve the artwork, but I couldn’t compel myself to work on it while the music itself wasn’t done. That’s how I found myself painting almost nights and days during the cold month of January 2026 to deliver the artwork on time.

As you can see, the painting itself is only a part of the whole cover artwork, and its simple frame and background are not only there to embellish its dark colors, but also to remind the viewer that he is, indeed, looking at a painting. The distance seemed crucial in conveying the right mood. Funnily, I had first envisioned this forest landscape to be entirely devoid of human presence, but I guess in the end I felt like using this well-known trick, many great masters and painters way more seasoned and skilled than I am, used before: adding a silhouette gives the viewer a sense of scale, and one has a better grasp on the depth of the painting this way. Plus, Angellore always has an angelic figure on its various covers – even if it sometimes leans more on the psychopomp kind, like on RNDM. Well, here it could very well be an angel in disguise.

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