The Great Old Ones

The literary output of H.P. Lovecraft has supplied creative fuel for many musicians over the decades, yet the French black metal act the Great Old Ones centered every release on those texts, beginning with the 2012 album Al Azif and continuing through the philosophically driven Cosmicism in 2019.

Benjamin Guerry launched the project as a solo endeavor in Bordeaux during 2009, crafting Lovecraft-themed music and words after first encountering the author’s work as a teenager. Two years later he assembled a full band, handling guitar and vocals while Jeff Grimal and Xavier Godart played guitars, Sébastien Lalanne handled bass, and Léo Isnard played drums.

The group’s debut full-length, Al Azif, surfaced in 2012 on the French underground label Les Acteurs de l’Ombre and drew from multiple Lovecraft stories, among them The Call of Cthulhu and The Music of Erich Zann. That same imprint issued the follow-up, Tekeli-Li, in 2014; rooted in the novel At the Mountains of Madness, the record pushed the band’s sound further into atmospheric black metal territory.

In 2016 the group signed with the major French independent metal label Season of Mist and parted ways with Lalanne and Godart. Their third album, EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy, appeared early the next year, built around Lovecraft’s fictional Massachusetts town of Innsmouth and featuring new members Aurélien Edouard on guitar and Jérôme Charbonnier on bass. The updated lineup then toured Europe, including shows alongside Gaahls Wyrd and Audn.

Grimal and Charbonnier departed in 2018, after which Guerry and the others welcomed bassist Benoit Claus and guitarist Alexandre Rouleau for subsequent live dates. The refreshed five-piece entered the studio in 2019 to record their fourth album, taking Lovecraft’s philosophy of Cosmicism—positing human insignificance within the cosmos—as its conceptual foundation. Season of Mist released Cosmicism late that year, following the arrival of the expansive single “The Omniscient.”