Progressive Rock
19 September 2026
The title track runs fifteen minutes and eighteen seconds and takes up two thirds of the record. It opens with Samuel Grégoire’s guitar and Olivier Heyte’s bass setting a pulse that’s in no hurry to accelerate, Denis Geerts split between drums and keyboards, and it opens out into symphonic stretches as the keyboards take up more room. The percussion layered over the basic rhythm gives it a Latin tilt, closer to Santana than to instrumental prog’s British touchstones.
The final stretch is where the piece makes up its mind: the colour darkens towards psychedelia and a long guitar solo carries it into silence.
“Setsubun”, seven minutes and twenty-one seconds, goes somewhere else. Geerts and Grégoire share the percussion and the track keeps shifting tempo, moving from jazz-tinged passages into blocks of heavy psychedelia. It’s the track where the three of them listen to each other hardest.
Two pieces and a little over twenty-two minutes leave Amour stating a vocabulary rather than building a record out of it: the long track and “Setsubun” look in different directions, with nothing in between to tie them together.
It was recorded, mixed and mastered with Nicolas Lomartire at Noise Factory Studio, and the artwork is by Sabyne Alain. It’s the Namur trio’s third release, after “The Virtues of Patience” (2019) and “Hyperborea” (2021), and it came out on 19 September.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Guillem Cardós