Country of origin: France Location: Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Occitanie (early); Paris, Île-de-France (later) Status: Active Formed in: 1999 Genre: Post-Black Metal, Shoegaze Themes: Nostalgia, Childhood, Beauty, Spirituality, Afterlife, Memories, Nature, Poetry Current label: Nuclear Blast Years active: 1999-present The solo project of Neige. As a child, Neige had dreams about a "Fairy Land", "a place with colors, forms and sounds that do not exist here." The music of Alcest is highly influenced by these dream experiences. The band started out playing black metal with a line-up including Famine. Starting with 2005's Le Secret EP, Alcest evolved into post-black metal with strong post-rock and shoegaze influences, a completely original style that would have been labeled as blackgaze around the mid-2010s and which influenced many well-known bands like Lantlôs, Deafheaven and Harakiri for the Sky. The band's name Alcest doesn't have any meaning; Neige just chose it for its noble ethereal sound and couldn't imagine any other name in its pronunciation ("Al-sest", IPA: [al'sɛst]) to fit better with this music. Neige has stated multiple times that Alcest is not affiliated in any way with far-right ideologies and that all the ambiguous collaborations with bands and musicians from such contexts have been errors he vehemently regrets. In a detailed Instagram post from 2021 he stated that Alcest and himself stand against any form of discrimination, racism, homophobia or transphobia and that the message of Alcest is about love and acceptance. Alcest起初是由Neige, Hegnor, Arguth三人共同组成的黑金属乐队,成立于1999年.随着时间的推移,Alcest逐渐演变成Neige一个人的音乐载体.而音乐风格也由最初冰冷生猛的黑金属向shoegaze乃至后摇滚转变