Some records arrive as assignments and quietly take over the room.
Dé(s)figurations is one of those. It does not ask for passive attention. It darkens the air, fills the corners, and makes note-taking feel almost beside the point.
But this is not about the listener. It is about a French artist who went quiet for most of a decade and came back carrying something heavier, stranger, and more fully her own than what she set down.
Thalie Némésis released her first full record, Némésis, in 2015, a dark, intimate, Lynch-haunted thing stitched from coldwave, trip hop, gothic tension, and riot grrrl nerve. Then she mostly went quiet. Not the quiet of someone who gave up. The quiet of someone gathering force.
Dé(s)figurations is what she came back with, and she did not wait for anyone’s permission to release it. She built the house first. The album arrives on Meridian Noir Records, the artist-run label she co-founded with Albin Wagener of The Memory Of Snow, a home for dark music that refuses to sit still inside any one genre.
That detail matters. This is not a comeback someone handed her. It is a comeback she constructed, brick by brick, so the work would have somewhere to live on her own terms.
The Sound
The closest useful comparison is Nine Inch Nails around The Fragile. This is industrial rock with the heart of gothic rock and the nervous system of darkwave. Roaring guitars share the room with string arrangements and cold synth textures that never quite resolve, and her vocals, moving between English and French, are the spine holding the structurally restless tracks together.
The credits matter here too. The album is produced by Thalie Némésis, with Peter Rainman handling the mix and master. The track “Defixiones” is a collaboration with British synthesist Eva|3, and you can feel the extra weather it brings.
One honest note for longtime listeners: you have already heard part of this. The first stretch of the record is essentially her Catarsi Apotropaica EP, repositioned as side one. That is not a knock so much as a heads-up. The full-length does not replace that material. It recontextualizes it.
This is also not a casual first listen. It runs just under forty-seven minutes, it is dense, and it asks you to come back. Give it the second and third play. It opens up.
The Weight
She has said she wanted to move away from simplistic anger toward something more layered, and you can hear that decision in the architecture. The record moves through myth, trauma, feminine archetypes, and transformation, but its real gravity is memory and the refusal to be diminished.
It is the sound of a woman who has decided she will not be written out of her own story.
It closes on “Forget My Name,” which ends on the words “Memory’s lost.” Sit with how strange and deliberate that is. A record this concerned with not being erased chooses to end on erasure. That is not a contradiction. That is the whole argument.
Who Needs This
If you want the Fragile-era trick of guitars, strings, and electronics all bleeding into one another, this is for you. If you live somewhere on the coldwave to gothic-industrial spectrum, this is for you. And if you have spent this particular stretch of history needing the specific sound of someone refusing to vanish, this record was practically built for you.
The fuller story, in her words and Albin’s, is coming to the print issue this October. Without giving it away: she talks about raising her own flag, in her own colors, and about why memory might be the quiet foundation under everything Meridian Noir is building.
The Memory Of Snow gets its own review soon, in its own room, because this music has earned the space.
Have you spent time with Dé(s)figurations yet? What got you first, the guitars or the ghosts? Tell me in the comments, and tell me the track you keep crawling back to.
Tags: thalie némésis, dé(s)figurations, meridian noir records, darkwave, gothic rock, industrial rock, coldwave, french dark music, album review, women in dark music
Where shadows dance and stories unfold.
Sources:
https://meridiannoirrecords.bandcamp.com
Jun 14, 2026