Klone’s new album, Meanwhile, is an exciting slice of concise yet progressive rock. Guitarist and co-founder Guillaume Bernard tells Prog about the hankering for gigs that inspired it – as well as their career-long journey from metal to art-rock.

Words: Matt Mills

Klone’s latest album is a step up from their previous work…

Images: Leo Margarit

Guillaume Bernard isn’t feeling very well. “My girlfriend is ill, and so am I,” the guitarist of atmospheric art-rockers Klone tells Prog when he joins our telephone call from his home in Poitiers. “I have Covid.”

Mercifully though, Bernard sounds okay, speaking in his thick French accent and answering every question that we throw his way at length. It’s a testament to his belief in the band he co-founded in 1995 – as well as their new release, Meanwhile – that he’s still so eager to talk while under the weather.

The band’s seventh album was forged through the fires of the pandemic. Meanwhile is the svelte and energetic sibling to 2019’s critically acclaimed Le Grand Voyage. On one level, the relation between the two is obvious. Both are hypnotic delves into the bliss of postrock. The songs witness gorgeous guitars and frontman Yann Ligner’s voice – so powerful yet controlled that it’d make Maynard James Keenan sweat – gradually crescendo into dramatic finales. Yet there’s still space for earworm choruses amid those progressions.