LANDMVRKS – The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been | Album Review

After the great Lost In The Waves, the Frenchmen from LANDMVRKS are back with an album that should leave no one indifferent.

Indeed, The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been is one of the most highly-anticipated albums of this year. The singles encapsulated the musical flow in French, choirs that still tear us apart, and those rhythmic guitars that capture our hearts. But let’s dig a bit deeper.

The album artwork already sets the tone: between the disturbing rock statues and the water in between that divides itself in two, an awful path is awaiting us: either an entrance into the abyss. Or hell for that matter. The eponymous track, ‘The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been’ strengthens that mindset.

Whispering softly: ‘Trapped in a cage made of fears, it’s all that I know, I designed it all, so I can’t leave, of all the places that I’ve seen and all the monsters in my dreams, it feels like the darkest place that I’ve ever been’, Florent Salfati sets us in the right mood. A feeling of danger is slowly intruding in the track, right before the piece’s instrumental doesn’t fall apart, getting us into that familiar metalcore from the Frenchmen. The idea of that opus finds itself here: the journey of a character going into the limbs of hell, perpetuating a physical and mental transformation.

It’s through this pattern that the serious work begins: ‘Creature’, first single by LANDMVRKS, out in 2024, features a rap part, completely in French, right before hitting us with a quick rhythm on a melodic and heartbreaking background. The symbolism is powerful: this creature is quite similar to the one we create deep inside us, destroying us from the inside while pursuing us throughout our life. Please, have a listen to ‘I turned into this creature’ or ‘I no longer feel ‘cause you took everything’ and have a look at the music video to understand it at its best.

It’s on this infernal journey that we follow our main character being possessed by this demon, such as in the track ‘A Line In The Dust’, featuring Matt Welsh of While She Sleeps. The sound is efficient, catchy, and Matt’s voice sets here perfectly. There is this frenzy of thoughts that gets along with the rhythmic beat. Trapped in a world where we can’t distinguish lies from truth, everything seems so fragile and we are somehow lulled…before reaching out to the iconic track ‘Blood Red’.

Between its moving French rap (among others) that we already sing to ourselves, and a musical background that takes you by storm, ‘Blood Red’ is set to be one of the strongest points of the album. The song is essentially a rollercoaster, heartbreaking, leading us through different feelings, between slowness and quickness, as a sweet torture inside of us. Between the French texts that portray this unhappiness and the screams that follow, the rhythm is set to the beat. It’s an effective formula that we find often on the opus, such as the tumultuous journey of the main character.

Through the duet of ‘Sulfur / Sombre 16′ (Dark 16) which gets everyone on the same page, the first song reminds us of that mythological side, where the ‘sky’s upside down, the floor starts to break.’ or even getting ‘closer to the edge.’ The ‘I’ sinks into suffering, the demerger between the realness and what is coming next. He’s getting deeper into the limbs of hell. That division also finds itself numerically with the French rap of ‘Sombre 16’ that divides the album in two and surprises us when taking that musical stand.

After ‘The Great Unknown’ that has some Linkin Park vibes and being one of the calmest songs on the album, LANDMVRKS keep going down into hell with ‘La Valse du Temps’ (The Waltz of Time). Its entrance with a classical background leaves us wondering, such as a vestige of the past. This song symbolizes the fragility and the fear that embraces us when we realize how time flies and wears us out. It feels like a call for help, coming from the grave, the phrases ‘Am I broken inside?’ or ‘I’ll find my place eventually’ catch us.

The band translate this musical waltz by wavering between the calm and the storm, a feeling we find again in ‘Trapped between the past and future and present.’ The track offers a trivial time, a battle between the past, present and the future, where, in the end, the present is the worst of them all.

Coming next is ‘Deep Inferno’, on this fire analogy where our own demons throw us into hell. We let ourselves be consumed by the time and this creature: ‘I saw the end. No one can fix me anyway’, ‘My mind is killing me.’ or even ‘I’ve been feeling useless’ are those sentences that we keep repeating to ourselves endlessly and which eat us from the inside. That is what we find again into ‘Requiem’, a soft melody that repeats itself. It may be soft, but it is still the heaviest song on the album (as they said prior in the interview). It could also remind us of the likes of Lorna Shore with its screaming. It’s heavy, just like we love it.

This album symbolizes the long path of what mental health does at its worst, how our own mind tires us, scares us, makes us think as an impostor or even paralyzes us, as the demon holds us. The band put a mystical side to their entire journey, almost like the Odyssey of Homer, that we find in the album’s artwork. And this journey leads us to our own ‘Funeral’, on a solemn piano, a state of the ongoing ill-being and yet so familiar, because this ‘never ending rain is all I know’.

The Darkest Place I’ve Ever Been. A familiar title for a concept album that sums up the evil of the century, that the band is bringing back with an interesting artistic and bold choice. The previous LANDMVRKS album, Lost In The Waves, was already conquered by an innovative artistic choice. However, here, the Frenchmen set the bar very high and have released arguably one of the best metalcore records of 2025.