Review: Ashbreather – La Grande Bouffe

Style: Progressive sludge metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Neurosis, early Mastodon, Conjurer, Dvne
Country: Canada
Release date: 19 September 2025

We can think of music as being a bit like a menu at a restaurant that serves everything, and while that’s a trite metaphor, it’s particularly apt for today’s review. Radio pop is your fast food, a quick, easy, cheap option. Classical is the Michelin star restaurant of cuisine, intimidating, expensive and intricate with a learning curve. Prog is a bit of a weird one. It can be pretentious, like a fancy sixteen course meal with tiny, complex little dishes, or it can just be bloating, like an eating contest. Often it’s both. Indeed, today you get to gorge yourself on a grand feast, quite literally La Grande Bouffe, the latest release from Quebecois threepiece Ashbreather.

It was back in 2022 that I reviewed Ashbreather’s sophomore album Hivemind, and one of my favourite things about the half-hour sludge track was the concept: a gnarly sci-fi horror tale of spacefaring scientists who splice their minds with extraterrestrials, only to cause immense psychic and sociological damage when they apply their neuroscience to an alien insect hivemind. It’s a deliciously fucked up story of societal madness and brain chemistry gone awry, but the question is, where do you go from there? To The Bean Pipe™, that’s where! Named for a provocative French film about four men who rent a villa, hire some prostitutes, and decide to eat themselves to death while engaged in nigh-continuous orgy, La Grande Bouffe chronicles the nauseating tale of a society grown rancidly dependent on the constant flow of piped beans into every home, and the disturbing gastrointestinal shenanigans that occur when, one day, The Bean Pipe™ runs dry. If that sounds like a disgusting agglutination of excess, that’s the point, and what better genre to explore such enteric carnage than sludge metal? 

Manic kit-spanning drumwork, lumbering riffs, muscular shouts, grating noise; this is textbook Ashbreather, mixing a Neurosis-y sense of sludge with heavier and nastier influences, like Slugdge-esque death metal, and moments of blackened intensity, as well as abrasive Oranssi Pazuzu style ambience, and doomy sections. All three members contribute vocals, yielding a combination of Scott Kelly-esque bellows, blackened screeches, and traditional death growls for a real sense of versatility. From the percussive sounds and the pulsating squelch of the beans as they’re pumped along The Bean Pipe™ in introductory track “Out of the Field”, you know you’re going to be in for a weird experience. This is progressive sludge, but not as you know it… mostly because it’s a lot more flatulent than the norm.  

Riffs alternate between doomy chugs, and noodly Mastodon-esque hammer-on/pull-off runs, with plenty of flies thrown in the proverbial soup. “La Grande Bouffe” opens in thrashy fashion, and the track’s mid-section descends into the ominous whooshing ambience familiar from Hivemind. “Feed Us!!!” opens with a swing rhythm while a petulantly cartoonish voiceover frets over the interruption to the endless bean supply. “Beef, Egg & Cabbage (Out of Stock)” starts with some acoustic work, as does album closer “Pulse” which also features clean singing, cultivating a classic grunge aesthetic before veering back into the sludge. Drummer Colin MacAndrew wins MVP, killing it on the kit, segueing from broad grooves to straight up blast beats, but the full trio are undeniably tight.

As Agellon croons on “Into the Maw”, ‘We’ll never wilt under their watchful eyes / Their grace and good will offer us stewardship, guidance,’ he’s singing from the perspective of the beans, envious of human sentience and yet honoured to be part of this life-sustaining ritual. This antacid-necessitating feral gluttony reads as metaphor, of humanity’s rampant excess, our dependence on so much unnecessary shit, of the swollen wallets of the ultracapitalists, of our environment-destroying appetite. In Ashbreather’s Hobbesian telling, when The Bean Pipe™ runs dry, the people turn on each other: ‘I must lay claim to all your beans / All equals, just meat, we’re all that’s left to eat.’ Meanwhile, the final track depicts a revolution of sorts. The last remaining human, a grotesquely corpulent monster that has consumed all others around him, sets upon devouring the only thing left to eat: himself (“And when I look to my torso / All I see is a morsel / Calling out my name / And screaming for me to bite down with feeling again.”). As he sets about his own autosarcophagic demise, an accumulation of beans tumbles out of his gargantuan mass and reclaims the world. 

My main issue with Hivemind concerned production, and while La Grande Bouffe shows slight improvement, notably in the crisp drum production, problems still remain, chiefly with the vocals. The vocal production is thin, somewhat weightless. This becomes a real issue in harmonies, either rendering one vocalist a clear “winner” in the mix, the other buried, or rendering both somewhat hissy and inaudible. Indeed, the low end in general is poorly served by the mix, which means the riffs and the vocals can lack a certain bite, although room is left for Charles Richards’ bass work to really gleam. When confined to one singer, guitar part, bass part and drums, the mix does fine, but extra elements find themselves somewhat strained. Ironically, La Grande Bouffe’s mix can’t hold as much weight as the bean-addled gastropods it depicts.

While the serviceable yet ropey production continues to hold the band back a little, La Grande Bouffe is a nauseating, quasi-Malthusian sludgathon. When it comes to narrative conceits, Ashbreather remain the undisputed kings of fucked up, creative concepts, and a tour of their gourmandising, gluttonous hellscape is hard to forget. God only knows what sphincter-pucking tale they’ll tell next. And now, having perused the menu of the prog restaurant, I think I’ll settle for tap water and some Pepto-Bismol.

Recommended tracks: La Grande Bouffe, Feed Us!!!, Pulse
You may also like: Monolith, Anciients, Slugdge
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Independent

Ashbreather is:
– Mackay Agellon – guitars, vocals, percussion, drones, synths, field recordings
– Charles Richards – bass, vocals, percussion, drones
– Colin MacAndrew – drums, vocals, rectals, percussion, drones