A Ballad Into the Pissoir des Dieux
I had been saving this one. Eight tracks finally up on Bandcamp, a free Sunday, and a band whose name puts a urinal next to the gods. You know roughly what you are walking into, and you walk in anyway.
The first track is a dark folk ballad on its way to the urinals of a casino. Casino Piss is a drunken love story: a kiss in the streets of Hackney, a man who walks off to piss and stays for the slot machines, and a woman left outside wondering what he is doing. Their star signs don’t agree but she bets on him regardless. And then, at the very end, a second voice joins her. A duet sung alone.
Drink enough and you start to feel like a god, right up until you are holding on to the wall of a urinal. The name is the whole arc of a night out.
The second track moves, oddly. There is a beat under it, the old Smiths trick of giving you something to nod along to while the words fall apart. The narrator takes stock of a body that no longer follows: shoulders rounding, no strength to get up, gone soft. Last night’s drink, or the years, or both. She concludes she should be shot. Then the song turns, the way most of them do here, and decides that humiliation is the pleasure. This is what is left of the god the next morning.
Anyone who has spent time with Lebanon Hanover will recognise Larissa Iceglass immediately. Same voice, same flat delivery. What changes is everything around it: no drum machine here, but dark folk guitar, a round low bass, an electric guitar that turns from dry tension to something close to romance, and the cold synth as the only thing carried over. The voice hasn’t moved. The room has, and it was built by Vincenzo Wieczerzynski of Chaos International and Owen Pratt of Uncanny Valley, who also mixed it.
Hotel Grand Amour came out in May 2025, sixteen months before the album it belongs to, and everything here is already in it. The streets are filthy and cold, she has been invited somewhere and goes wandering instead, past the sex shops and the incel bars, wondering how not to die alone. Without ever finding the Hotel Grand Amour.
Vultures leaves the city altogether. Dark folk over cold wave, a road trip through a desert at what the song calls the truck stop of death, a male voice sliding in underneath to watch the birds circle overhead. She ends up in a motel full of feral lads, filth and hate, frightened and staying anyway. The barman serves her drinks with a toothless smile: kind of hot, kind of vile. My favourite track here, because it is the one where the album stops pretending it wants to be saved.
Then the record gets funny. The narrator notices that age is turning her into Jack Nicholson, the 1998 one, pleated trousers and sovereign contempt, Melvin Udall rather than Jack Torrance. Someone reassures her: you’re still not like in The Shining. Half comforting, at best. From young and sad into a maniac, and that, she says, is where it all makes sense.
The three I have left alone belong to the same night. 24-7 has her scrolling through someone’s pictures at all hours, Internet Cafe sends prayers to the algorithm, and Triple Sized Cocktail orders another round in a lobby at four in the morning. Old genre, very current afflictions.
Eight songs and nobody goes home. Feeling divine, most likely, right up until the wall of the urinal. That is the whole record, and it is a very good one.
Pissoir des Dieux is out now on Bandcamp, on Fabrika Records. Digital from €9. Black vinyl, limited to 500, with printed inner sleeve and download, from €23. Pink vinyl, also limited, from €25. Both ship around 30 September 2026.
© Ian Joy for Catastrophe Ballet
