We were obviously pretty excited to help break the news last month that Chevreuil was making a return, and that their impending LP Stadium would be a four-dimensional chess game due to the fact that it’s allegedly two separate albums you play simultaneously.
To come back so confidently with something bold and bizarre like that is at once refreshing and also perfectly in line with the spirit of the band – Chevreuil’s sound has always been a cascading river of loops, and now, we get a full ocean of it.
Still, today we get our next preview and it’s got us as excited as ever because it’s actually not what we expected. “Plexus” is darker, grittier, more damaged. So is it a teaser of more nastiness to come or is it part of something even bigger?
From what we can tell, it’s probably a lot of both.
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Towards the end of the song, things shift into an even more uncanny section that’s got junkyard levels of industrial without using any of the traditional distortion or pulsating grooves, almost taking the listener to Downward Spiral territory. It’s somehow cinematic and minimal at the same time, begging for use in some kind of brutal or disturbing scene. For some, it’s going to be nightmare fuel, but for noise rock, math rock, and experimental music fans, Chevreuil continues to excite. Don’t forget to pre-order Stadium here at Computer Students before it’s finally out April 24th.
Also, if you’re looking to catch up on the saga, check out the press release below:
“Chevreuil is the French rock duo of Julien F. and Tony C., formed in 1998 after the two met three years earlier at an Art School. From the beginning, they approached the idea of a band as a performative art installation — a self-contained, sculptural device for sound, space, and motion rather than a conventional rock ensemble. Julien and Tony, respectively, in their parlance, play “magnetic drums” and “magnetic guitar,” an analogy for their livewire, one-on-one chemistry, where the music seems to fall together by way of natural forces.
Rejecting the addition of a bassist early on, Chevreuil built its music around reduction, repetition, and architecture. Tony’s guitar runs through four amplifiers arranged around Julien’s drum kit, creating a quadraphonic field that surrounds the players. Julien’s 1976 Ludwig kit — built the same year both musicians were born — is never amplified, allowing the group to perform anywhere so long as there’s a single outlet for the amplifiers. The result is both physical and spatial — a minimalist engine of rhythm and resonance that behaves as much like an installation as a band. Their sound construction, layered through loopers and analog devices, operates like an assemblage of interlocking blocks of energy, each part locking precisely into the next. Between 1998 and 2006, Chevreuil released four albums, an EP, and several singles. Their recorded legacy includes Sport (2000), Ghetto Blaster (2001), Châteauvallon (2003), Science (EP, 2006), and Capoëira (2006). The last three were recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago. Issued on RuminanCe (Paris, France), Sickroom Records (Chicago, USA), and StiffSlack (Nagoya, Japan), these releases placed Chevreuil within a transatlantic network of artists who explore form and texture rather than genre convention.
After a 20-year hiatus, Chevreuil returns with the double album Stadium, recorded in France in January 2025 and slated for release on April 24, 2026. The project began as a plan to reissue their early work through Computer Students™, but quickly evolved into a new entity. Having not played together for 15 years, the duo spent a week together testing whether their long-dormant chemistry could still function. By day they recorded; by night they cooked for each other, rekindling the ease and discipline that defined their partnership.
Stadium, Chevreuil’s most esoteric album to date, preserves the essential conditions of their earlier work — live recording, unamplified drums, and four-amp immersion — while introducing new elements that expand the duo’s sonic vocabulary. Central to this evolution is a reconfigured guitar, functioning as a hybrid electro-acoustic engine capable of generating electronic timbres without compromising the project’s self-contained design.
Conceptually, the album draws on the music of the spheres, magnetism, radioactivity, barometric oscillations, astrometry and magic, using these ideas as lenses for exploring vibration and transformation. For reference, archival purposes and to provide full technical transparency, the Deluxe and Limited editions feature a 12-page codex documenting the band’s complete recording configuration, including all parameter settings and specifications.”
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