There are certain spaces in the geography of modern music that function less as studios and more as secular cathedrals. Number 3 Abbey Road in London’s St John’s Wood is chief among them, a Georgian townhouse whose walls are saturated with the resonant frequencies of history.1 Stepping inside such a place, an artist does more than simply record; they engage in a dialogue with the ghosts of popular culture, from Sir Edward Elgar to The Beatles, Pink Floyd to Anathema. For the French band The Old Dead Tree, a group whose entire artistic identity was forged in the crucible of a deeply personal tragedy, this act becomes a pilgrimage.
The announcement of their new EP, ‘London Sessions,’ recorded within these hallowed halls and set for release on November 28, 2025, via Season of Mist, is therefore not merely news of a forthcoming record. It is a profound statement of intent: an effort to place a private history of grief and resilience into the grand, public continuum of musical legend, transforming a story born of intimate pain into a work of universal art.
The Old Dead Tree: A History Written in Scars
To understand the weight of this moment, one must understand the history of The Old Dead Tree, a story written in scars. Formed in Paris in 1997 by vocalist-guitarist Manuel Munoz and guitarist Nicolas Chevrollier, the band quickly distinguished itself with a unique fusion of extreme metal’s ferocity and the melancholic elegance of dark rock.
Their 1999 debut EP, ‘The Blossom,’ was met with enthusiasm, signaling the arrival of a promising and singular new voice. But this nascent promise was shattered when, just months after the EP’s release, drummer Frédéric Guillemot took his own life.
That event became the band’s foundational trauma, an axis upon which their entire artistic world would turn. The members chose to “exorcise the dramatic loss of their close friend by expressing the darkest feelings and frustration this trauma provoked in a new concept album.” The result was 2003’s ‘The Nameless Disease,’ a work of raw, cathartic power that served as both a tribute and a therapy session set to music.
Its unflinching honesty resonated, earning critical acclaim and propelling the band onto European tours alongside genre titans like Paradise Lost, Opeth, and Katatonia. This period saw them solidify their reputation as a pillar of the French metal scene with two more celebrated albums, ‘The Perpetual Motion’ (2005) and ‘The Water Fields’ (2007), which refined their sound into a more progressive and nuanced form of gothic metal.
Yet the personal investment required to sustain this emotional intensity proved immense. In 2009, the band officially disbanded, citing burnout. A long silence followed, punctuated only by a brief reunion in 2013 to mark the tenth anniversary of ‘The Nameless Disease.’ It seemed the story had reached its conclusion in 2019 with the release of an EP poignantly titled ‘The End.’ Containing material written in 1999 just before Guillemot’s death, it was explicitly framed as a final tribute and a definitive closure for the band’s career.
However, the global introspection forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the obligation to honor a single sold-out Paris concert, slowly rekindled the creative fire. The enthusiastic reception of a new single, ‘Terrified,’ in 2023, and a high-profile appearance at the Hellfest festival, paved the way for a full, unexpected resurrection. This culminated in the 2024 release of ‘Second Thoughts,’ their first full-length album in seventeen years.
The band’s career has never been a linear progression but a cyclical dialogue with its own origins. Each new chapter is a re-examination of that initial trauma, and the ‘London Sessions’ EP, recorded in the shadow of musical giants, is the most ambitious turn in that cycle yet.
The Confession in the Spotlight
The first evidence of this new chapter arrives with the EP’s lead single, ‘Feel Alive Again.’ The song is a masterful study in dynamics, beginning with what is described as a “confession” before building to a “soaring crescendo” that merges the band’s dark progressive foundation with an almost startlingly open-hearted stadium rock grandeur.
This sonic expansion is not a betrayal of their melancholic roots but an evolution of them. The music feels at once “airy and direct,” a precise balance of “vulnerability and strength” that reflects a psychological shift from introverted grief to a more public, confident declaration of survival.
The accompanying music video, directed by longtime collaborator Julien Metternich, reinforces this narrative. Stripping away complex artifice, it places the focus squarely on the band’s “chemistry and raw presence,” presenting a reunited entity, re-energized and in command. This choice is deliberate. The band’s early work was necessarily insular, a private conversation about a public loss.
The anthemic scale of ‘Feel Alive Again’ and the directness of its visual presentation signal a move outward. As Manuel Munoz has explained, much of the band’s recent work grapples with “doubt, struggling with your own fears.” The song, then, is the sonic embodiment of overcoming that doubt. They are no longer just processing their sorrow; they are proclaiming their resilience from a grand stage.
Ghosts in the Machine
That stage could not be more significant. Abbey Road Studios is more than just a recording facility; it is a living archive. Opened in 1931 as the world’s first purpose-built recording studio, it was the site where EMI engineer Alan Blumlein patented stereo recording, fundamentally altering the course of audio history. It was the creative workshop for nearly the entirety of The Beatles’ catalog and the experimental laboratory for Pink Floyd’s sonic explorations.
In recent decades, its cavernous Studio 1, originally designed for 110-piece orchestras, has become a premier destination for the recording of epic film scores, including those for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ series.
The opportunity to record there was offered to The Old Dead Tree while they were in the midst of writing ‘Second Thoughts,’ a pivotal moment in their return. For a band whose recent work has become increasingly complex and layered—with Munoz at times recording “thirty tracks of vocals” to create a “full choir” effect—the choice of the orchestral-scaled Studio 1 was a statement of profound ambition.
The session, produced and engineered by François-Maxime Boutault, also featured guest cellist Raphaël Verguin, further underscoring a desire to expand their sonic palette. Placing their dense, orchestrally-inclined progressive metal within a room built for that very scale, The Old Dead Tree asserts that their music, though born from a different tradition, possesses the same emotional scope and compositional complexity as the cinematic works recorded in that same hall.
‘London Sessions’: A Bridge Between Then and Now
The structure of the ‘London Sessions’ EP is itself a narrative device, a work of temporal reconciliation. The four-song collection begins with two new compositions, ‘Feel Alive Again’ and ‘Time Has Come,’ which establish the band’s forward-looking artistic direction. It then pivots to look backward, presenting new versions of two tracks from their 2005 album ‘The Perpetual Motion,’ now titled ‘By The Way (London Sessions 2025)’ and ‘What Else Could We’ve Said (London Sessions 2025).’
This album was a crucial release in their history, the first to follow the raw catharsis of ‘The Nameless Disease,’ and re-approaching its material is a significant act.
These are not faithful reproductions but deliberate re-interpretations, filtered through seventeen years of life and artistic growth. The inclusion of Verguin’s cello adds a new layer of elegiac texture, a classical sorrow that connects the material to the band’s deepest gothic roots.
This structure collapses time, allowing the mature, technically advanced band of today to reach back and engage in a creative dialogue with their younger selves. The EP serves as a bridge, demonstrating that their past is not a fixed point to be memorialized but a living text to be re-read, healing the rupture of their long silence and affirming the continuity of their artistic journey.
The French Elegists in a Lineage of Sorrow
The Old Dead Tree’s journey can be understood as a case study in the evolution of European gothic metal. Emerging in the wake of English pioneers like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, their sound has always shared that tradition’s “combination of the darkness and melancholy of goth rock with heavy metal.”
Gothic metal as a genre is defined by its melodramatic and romantic lyrical preoccupations with loss, suicide, and despair, themes that ‘The Nameless Disease’ explored with an almost unparalleled directness.2 Their music, with its dynamic shifts between Munoz’s clean tenor and guttural growls, perfectly embodies the genre’s sonic dualities.
Yet, where their early work was a raw expression of these foundational tropes, their subsequent evolution has pushed them into more progressive territory. Drawing from the slow tempi and thematic weight of doom metal, which concerns itself with mortality and powerlessness, they have developed a more sophisticated musical language.3
Their recent work, while still rooted in the same emotional core, demonstrates a far broader and more complex palette. They have taken the foundational elements of their genre and have spent over two decades maturing them, a process that the ‘London Sessions’ documents with newfound clarity and ambition.
Not an End, But a Resonance
In the resonant chambers of Abbey Road Studios, The Old Dead Tree has allowed their own ghosts—of loss, of doubt, of their younger selves—to commune with the legends of music history. The ‘London Sessions’ EP is the result of that communion. It is an echo chamber where past and present, personal tragedy and universal art, all coexist.
It is not an end, nor is it merely a new beginning. It is a powerful act of synthesis, a definitive statement that the band’s story is not defined by its conclusion but by its continuation, and that their history, however painful, remains the inexhaustible source of their enduring artistic strength.
The Old Dead Tree’s journey is one of transforming profound personal tragedy into a lasting artistic statement. In what ways do you find that music, particularly within the darker and more melancholic genres, provides a unique space for processing grief and achieving catharsis, both for the artist and the listener?
References
- Museum of London. ‘The history of Abbey Road Studios.’ Accessed October 12, 2023. ↩︎
- Bardine, Bryan. ‘Gothic and Death Metal Music: A Symbiotic Relationship? In Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures,’ 570-588. Helsinki: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2015. ↩︎
- Spracklen, Karl. ‘‘True’ Norwegian Black Metal? In Heavy Metal Music in Britain,’ edited by Gerd Bayer, 189-204. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ↩︎
Discussion