A scientific term that confirms ancient maritime legends, the rogue wave ("vague scélérate" in french) rises suddenly in the open sea, climbing to vertiginous heights. Shattering the oceans’ tranquility, the phenomenon transforms its surroundings in a fraction of a second. Unpredictable and striking, this epic surge now serves the artistic intentions of Gros Cœur. Returning from an odyssey of 150 concerts—with stops in North America and Great Britain, as well as some legendary performances at festivals such as Left of the Dial, RoadBurn, and Levitation—the Belgian band expands its psychedelic intuitions in the light of Vague Scélérate.
Powerful, dense, and dance-inducing, this second album contains five marathon tracks: long-form trances that, without warning, stretch their tentacular ideas into tropical waters. With Vague Scélérate, the quartet dilates space-time, deliberately stepping away from the conventions bounded by algorithms. A versatile, shape-shifting, and profoundly human record, this new effort elevates the band’s kaleidoscopic visions through a collection of diverse pieces.
Generous in effort and meticulous in emotional craftsmanship, Gros Cœur moves back and forth along the timeline, drawing ideas from the golden age of psychedelia, the heights of Anatolian rock, the desert, and the shores of stoner rock. In this hallucinatory road trip, the four musicians traverse continents and gather the worlds of artists as singular as Goat, Altin Gün, Flavien Berger, Mdou Moctar, Kikagaku Moyo, or King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The wave carries everything in its path.
Conceived between the province of Liège and that of Quebec, Vague Scélérate truly took shape in Soumagne, a small, verdant village perched on the heights of the Pays de Herve. It is there, in an attic overlooking the fields, that the band envisions its future. Far from the city, social networks, and the noise of the times, the four musicians laid the foundations of a record captured in the Koko studio lair, alongside Laurent Eyen (La Jungle, It It Anita).
With this second album, the writing sharpens and the voice asserts itself, stepping boldly toward ambitious and daring compositions. Without neglecting vocal production, Vague Scélérate elevates the melody of words through phantasmagorical narratives. Metaphors and analogies, hopes and disillusions crowd the doorway, giving life to songs delivered in the first person singular. A decoy, in fact, for this record is the reflection of the four personalities that make Gros Cœur beat.