Most of what Alice Simard makes is not built to be hummed. Across roughly twenty-seven active projects, the Montreal multi-instrumentalist writes death metal that rewards close listening rather than easy recall. Luminesce is the exception, and Like Crushed Violets and Linen, her second album under that name, is the clearest case yet for why.
The vocals do the work. Simard's death growls are enunciated with unusual care, chosen and placed rather than blasted through, and she has named her two reference points plainly: Derek Rydquist, who sang on The Faceless's Planetary Duality and Akeldama and now fronts Zenith Passage, and Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder. Both are known for treating a growl as something closer to phrasing than noise, and that's the register Simard is reaching for here.
The material underneath is a patchwork by design.
Some of these songs are old, written years back as straightforward fast melodic death metal. Others date from 2025 and 2026 and pull further from that template, closer to the neoclassical, counterpoint-heavy guitar writing Simard favours elsewhere in her catalogue. Bright, synthwave-tinted keyboard lines run through both kinds of song, giving the record a neon cast that sits oddly, appealingly, against blast beats and guttural vocals. She still calls it technical death metal, and structurally it is, but the surface is friendlier than that description suggests.
That friendliness extends to subject matter. "The Covenant of Counterfeit Stars" reads as something close to optimistic by death metal's usual standards, a deliberate swerve away from the genre's default grimness. It isn't an isolated gesture; across the album Simard uses colour and ornament, in lyric and in synth line alike, the way other bands in this genre use dread.
None of this makes Like Crushed Violets and Linen a pop record. The guitar writing still carries traces of Necrophagist's density, and the drum programming stays relentless under the piano and keyboard passages that soften it. But the choices are legible in a way Simard's more purely technical work often isn't, and Luminesce is where you can hear her deliberately courting a listener rather than testing one.
Released on 20 January, the album follows 2025's Mirrored as Luminesce's second full-length. Within Simard's enormous, genre-hopping output, it functions as a kind of key: proof that the same writer capable of brutal death metal and neoclassical shred also knows exactly how a hook works, and chooses, most of the time, not to use one.
