Slift ‘Fantasia’ Review: Finding Hope in the Fantastical

A concept album about a wanderer who tries to find a new home in a hostile city, Slift’s Fantasia dips into its myriad influences to concoct a hopeful vision of reckoning. The French trio’s heavy music is largely indebted to psych and prog—Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Hawkwind are among their ancestors—but they’re also inspired by Sleep’s stoner hymns and the hardcore-inflected post-metal of Isis and Neurosis. Their music also draws from literature: “Orbus Tertius,” for one, alludes to a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

Fantasia is less maximalist than Slift’s 2024 album Ilion, which saw the band jamming out across tracks that sometimes exceeded the 12-minute mark. But they still continue to indulge in long stretches here, with most songs pushing past five or six minutes. The band’s devotion to the riff allows the music to mutate into new forms: The album’s eight songs feels spontaneous and free-form, never cycling back to repeat verses or choruses.

Heavy on low-end frequencies, Fantasia never gets too muddy, with Rémi Fossat’s melodic basslines and Canek Flores’s drums, full of tom-tom fills and crashing cymbals, occupying the foreground. “The Village” begins with an eerie quiet but slowly arrives at an agitated crescendo, while “Waiting Man” starts out with brittle, frayed guitar before the rumbling bass kicks in.

Slift employs the language of fantasy to speak about xenophobia and political hypocrisy: “The glowworms comes in procession/The flying ants dance has begun/Claws for a throne,” frontman Jean Fossat sings on “Corrupted Sky.” Elsewhere, the title track finds him shouting in a terrified bark: “You carry the world on your shoulders!” So while the band’s influences might be rooted in the past, Fantasia’s harrowing anger gestures toward the reality of our troubled moment.