In art, the act of alteration is fundamental. It is the process by which an artist metabolizes their history—personal, cultural, and aesthetic—and through a deliberate act of deconstruction, creates a new identity from the fragments. This is not merely evolution, which suggests a linear and passive progression, but a conscious, often violent, reshaping of the self. For the French industrial metal project Heartlay, this process has become the explicit subject of its next major work.
The announcement of a new album, titled ‘The Alteration,’ signals a turn toward a more elemental and confrontational form of expression, one where the method of its creation is inextricably bound to its thematic core.
Released on October 10, 2025, through the independent label An Exile, the album is a defining statement in the project’s trajectory.¹ ‘The Alteration’ represents a significant turning point, where a raw, almost archaeological excavation of sound is used to explore psychological struggle and transformation. It delivers not just a new collection of songs, but a document of an artistic identity being intentionally dismantled and rebuilt.
Heartlay: An Architecture of Aggression
To understand the significance of this shift, one must first appreciate the remarkably consistent architecture of Heartlay’s past. Since its formal inception, the project, helmed by vocalist and principal composer Aaron Sadrin, has maintained a prolific and disciplined output.
The journey began with the debut album ‘Close to Collapse’ in 2017, which established a potent framework of industrial rock, blending immense, downtuned guitars with synthetic textures and Sadrin’s dynamic vocal delivery. This foundation was expanded upon with ‘Attack & Agony’ in 2019, which deepened the electronic elements and refined the project’s aggressive yet melodic sensibilities.
The 2021 release, ‘We Are All Awake,’ continued this progression, followed by ‘Sovereign Sore’ in 2023, each record arriving with the regularity of a ticking clock, each honing a powerful and increasingly polished production style.
This methodical two-year album cycle challenges the romanticized trope of the tortured artist, whose work arrives in sporadic, chaotic bursts of inspiration. Instead, the discography reveals a creative engine fueled by a relentless work ethic.
Sadrin has described himself as being in a state of near-constant creation. “My protocol is a bit different than that as I am more or less constantly writing,” he explained in an interview. “Someday I wake up and I realize ‘oh so I have enough material for a new Heartlay record’. I do not feel alright if I do not write for too long, it is in my DNA.”
This admission recasts the darkness inherent in Heartlay’s music. It is not the product of fleeting emotional turmoil but a subject explored through a structured and deliberate craft. The aggression is not spontaneous; it is architected.
A Lineage of Noise and Melody
Heartlay’s sound exists within a rich and complex historical continuum. The project’s chosen field, industrial metal, is itself a hybrid, born from the collision of two distinct and potent musical movements.
The first, industrial music, emerged in the mid-1970s from the experimental work of British artists like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. As chronicled by the musicologist S. Alexander Reed in his seminal text, ‘Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music,’ this was not initially a genre of music but an ideological stance—an avant-garde movement that used noise, found sounds, and transgressive performance to critique cultural authority and dismantle the assumptions of a post-industrial society.1 It was, in its purest form, “anti-music,” a revolt against order and reason itself.2
By the late 1980s, this abrasive, electronic ethos began to merge with the visceral power of heavy metal. Bands like Ministry in the United States and Godflesh in the United Kingdom fused industrial’s mechanical pulse and sampled textures with the weight of distorted guitars, creating a new and formidable sound. However, it was Nine Inch Nails that perfected the formula for a mass audience in the 1990s.
Trent Reznor’s project brought the genre to a commercial zenith by tempering its aggression with accessible song structures and what one critic for Rolling Stone described as “industrial-strength noise over a pop framework.” This became the dominant paradigm for modern industrial rock, and it is within this lineage—which also includes artists like Tool and Depeche Mode, whom Sadrin has cited as influences—that Heartlay’s work is situated.
Adding another layer of context is the project’s French origin, a nation with its own often-overlooked history of pioneering electronic music that developed in parallel to the more celebrated German and British scenes.3
Heartlay’s career can be seen as a microcosm of the central tension that Reed identifies at the core of industrial music’s history: the conflict between its radical, anti-commercial origins and its eventual assimilation into more popular forms. Reed charts a progression in the music from “enacting to connoting to resembling a machine.”4
Heartlay’s earlier, polished work, with its clear nods to commercially successful acts, arguably falls into this later, assimilated phase, expertly “resembling” the machine within an established rock context. The creative process for ‘The Alteration,’ however, represents a conscious break from this model—a deliberate return to the genre’s more foundational, experimental ethos.
‘The Alteration’: Sonic Archaeology
The most compelling evidence for this shift lies in Sadrin’s detailed account of the album’s production. For ‘The Alteration,’ he abandoned conventional methods in favor of a new sampling technique rooted in the principles of musique concrète.
“A lot of sounds were manually taken by me using a recorder,” he stated, “catching sounds from utility equipment, subway trains, doors, room ambiences… I experimented things such as leaving the recording device alone in the dark for dozens of minutes in the cellar of my childhood, trying to catch the eeriest sounds possible.”
This practice is a form of sonic archaeology, an excavation of the ambient noise of both public spaces and deeply personal history.
This process of raw creation was paired with a deconstruction of the past. Sadrin described using “ancient sample banks from the nineties or even before that time,” only to “destroy them into pieces in my sequencer and build something new out of it.”
The stated goal was to achieve a sound that was “uniquely gritty,” resulting in a record that he feels is “darker, more intimidating than before… very compact, thick and agressive.”
Here, the creative process becomes a direct metaphor for the album’s thematic concerns. Sadrin has characterized his lyrics as “very confessional,” focusing on “reality, in a theatrical way” and exploring subjects of adversity, sorrow, and healing.
The act of capturing sounds from a childhood cellar—a physical repository of memory—and violently reassembling sonic artifacts of the past mirrors the psychological work of confronting and reprocessing trauma. The sound of ‘The Alteration’ is not simply about transformation; it is the audible result of a literal process of alteration.
Dispatches from the Alteration
The advance singles released over the past year offered a clear map of this journey into a darker sonic territory. The first, ‘Suits You So Well,’ functions as a bridge from the established Heartlay sound.
It is a potent blend of “anthemic choruses, crushing riffs, and a vocal performance that effortlessly shifts from brutal to beautiful,” anchored by lyrics of raw emotional conflict. The accompanying music video, directed by guitarist Nicolas Jeff Thibaud, is an intense, performance-based piece that visually establishes the album’s aggressive energy.
Subsequent releases, such as ‘As We Take It All Away’ and ‘Held Beneath,’ signaled a deeper descent into the album’s core aesthetic. Presented with “Official Visualizers” rather than full narrative videos, these tracks feel more insular and atmospheric. They are built on the kind of eerie, gritty textures Sadrin cultivated through his experimental sampling, creating a mood that is less outwardly aggressive and more psychologically unsettling.
This serialized release strategy, with singles appearing steadily since early 2024, allowed the album’s narrative to unfold gradually, pulling the listener deeper into its world with each dispatch.
The Anatomy of a Modern Confession
Synthesizing these elements, a holistic vision of ‘The Alteration’ emerges. The album’s tracklist, presented in full, reads like a narrative arc of internal struggle. It begins with the confrontational declarations of ‘Suits You So Well’ and ‘Eye For An Eye,’ moves through the introspection of ‘The Ghost From Within’ and ‘Shadow So Withdrawn,’ confronts the central conflict in ‘The Duel In Me,’ and reaches its transformative climax with the title track, ‘The Alteration.’
The journey concludes with the resolutions implied by titles like ‘And Wrath Followed’ and the closing track, ‘A Path Of Shades.’ This structure creates a complete, self-contained narrative, one rendered not just in words but in the very fabric of its sound.
Sonically, the album is a work of stark contrasts, with moments of searing melodic catharsis erupting from dense, abrasive walls of sound constructed from the project’s newfound sonic palette. It is Heartlay’s most dynamic and texturally complex record to date. Thematically, it is the culmination of Sadrin’s confessional approach, an album where the theatricality of past work is stripped away in favor of a rawer, more direct, and ultimately more vulnerable form of expression.
The Catharsis of Creation
Ultimately, the significance of ‘The Alteration’ lies not only in its sound but in its transparent process. Embracing a method of deconstruction and reconstruction—of found sounds, of historical influences, of personal experiences—Heartlay has done more than write an album.
The project has documented the very act of artistic and personal transformation. The record’s “darker, a more intimidating” nature is not an endpoint but a byproduct of an authentic creative catharsis. ‘The Alteration’ is titled as such because it is a work that was not merely composed, but fundamentally altered into existence.
Aaron Sadrin’s method of excavating sounds from his past to construct ‘The Alteration’ suggests a deep link between memory and creation. How do you perceive the role of an artist’s personal history in their work, and where do you draw the line between authentic expression and pure invention?
References
- Reed, S. Alexander. ‘Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music.’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ↩︎
- Savage, Jon. ‘Introduction to Industrial Culture Handbook.’ San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983. ↩︎
- Gann, Kyle. ‘Strands of the future: France and the birth of electronica.’ Volume! la revue des musiques populaires, no. 3 (2004): 59–79. ↩︎
- Heetderks, David J. ‘Review of S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford University Press, 2013).’ Music Theory Online 20, no. 2 (June 2014). ↩︎
Discussion