Twenty Minutes in Angers: An Interview with Endeavour
Formed in Angers, France in 2022, Endeavour released their second EP Astonishment in February 2026. Four tracks of doom-stoner built from hardcore urgency and dark melody, recorded at Dôme Studio with producer David Potvin. Drummer Simon on studios, influences, and the particular weight of building something heavy in a city that has never asked for it.
Angers is a city of stone and river light, an hour southwest of Paris on the Loire. Endeavour formed there in 2022, drawing from hardcore, stoner, and metal, and the city is, on paper, the wrong place for all three. Four years in, they have two EPs behind them and a very specific idea of what they are building.
Their second release, Astonishment, came out on 27 February 2026. Four tracks, twenty minutes, recorded in December 2025 at Dôme Studio in Angers with producer David Potvin. The EP’s cover shows a mining site: tunnels, industrial dark, and somewhere above it all, light through cloud. The band chose it deliberately. Simon, Endeavour’s drummer, calls this romantic, and he means it without apology. The first EP, recorded live at La Cuve Studio in 2024, was a different kind of experience, and the move between the two says something about where the band was heading.
Doomnation Radio: The first EP was recorded live at La Cuve Studio in Angers in 2024. Astonishment moves to Dôme Studio, to separate takes, to a producer who works in metal. What shifted?
When we got to La Cuve two years ago, we were seduced by the idea of playing our music live. It was a challenge because it was our first EP, we didn’t know the guys at the studio, and it was my first time as a drummer in a studio. But it was great because we learned a lot from that record: which direction we wanted to take, how to be more precise in our execution, how to simplify the whole thing. So for Astonishment, we decided to go for a new experience at Dôme Studio. David is specialized in metal music, which was not the case at La Cuve. We thought it would be easier to get the sound we were pursuing with a true metal head. Moreover, the studio was really nice and cozy, and we recorded the EP by separate takes. It was way easier like that and it allowed us to focus on other things, like the singing or the mixing. Great experience.
The Influences
That clarity of focus shows in the result. Astonishment is compressed and purposeful, four tracks that move without hesitation. The three bands Endeavour name as their core influences, Hangman’s Chair, Tar Pond, and Alice in Chains, come from different countries, different decades, and different scenes, but the distance between them is smaller than it looks. Hangman’s Chair formed in 2005 in Crosne, in the Essonne south of Paris, with roots in hardcore punk. Over the following two decades they built their own strain of cold, urban doom, and their vocal melodies, dark and harmonically precise, carry an echo of exactly what Alice in Chains were doing in Seattle in the early nineties. Both bands understand that heaviness and melody are not opposites. Tar Pond draws the line further back still, into the world of Celtic Frost and Coroner. The Swiss project formed in Zurich in 2015 around Martin Ain, Celtic Frost’s bassist, alongside Marky Edelmann, drummer and lyricist of Coroner. They wrote and recorded their debut in 2016 and 2017. Before it could come out, Ain died in 2017. The band nearly dissolved. They continued, with Monica Schori taking over on bass, and Protocol of Constant Sadness appeared in 2020. Three different genealogies, then, but Simon names what connects them.
DR: What is the actual thread connecting those three for you?
I think the link between those three bands is the sadness and the beauty you can feel in every one of them. And also the heaviness. But we are never thinking about that when we start writing a new song. We all have different influences and try to mix them as much as we can. The goal is that everyone in the band likes the song. We don’t like compromises and it makes the process of creation quite long and challenging sometimes.
The Hardest Song
That process, everyone in the band has to like the song with no exceptions, is audible in the record itself. The title track is where it cost them most. Simon describes it as the hardest thing they had built: drum parts that cost him real hours, a song where different sections resisted and had to be worked back into shape. He has been playing drums for five years. The EP was built around that reality, not in spite of it.
DR: Where did the title come from, and does it describe the music, an experience, a feeling the band was in when writing it?
“Astonishment” was the name of the song, firstly. It was a challenging song for all of us. We spent a lot of hours working on different parts. The drum parts were really difficult for me because I am a new drummer – I have only been playing for five years. It came as an evidence to name the EP from the song, because of the hard work and the significance of the word itself. When you turn on the radio or look at the news, there are tons of reasons to be astonished, unfortunately. People can understand it as they want, but for me it was a symbol of how bad the world is turning and how great the things of life and around can also be. This is why we chose a mining site as a visual, because it reflected a kind of astonishment and also a lot of hope, symbolized by the light behind the clouds. We are quite romantic.
DR: Members of Endeavour come from the hardcore, stoner, and metal scenes. How do those instincts negotiate inside the same room?
Simon: I don’t think you can really feel in our music that we are hardcore fans, for example, and even the stoner music is not that obvious, I would say. But I think we all carry different backgrounds and not even just with music tastes. Life and the different burdens and joys we all carry have an undeniable influence on our way of playing and writing.
Wrong is Right?
That double register, grief and hope held together, neither cancelling the other, is what the EP’s closing track presses hardest. “Wrong is Right” wears its sarcasm close to the surface, and Simon attributes its concept to his singer, Nicolas, and to Saint Augustine. The pairing is less eccentric than it sounds. Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 CE in Roman North Africa, spent nine years as a Manichaean before his conversion to Christianity. Manichaeism was a religion built entirely on opposition: light against darkness, good against evil, the spiritual world locked in permanent war with the material one. Augustine came to reject that binary as a philosophical failure. Reality, he concluded, was too complex to be divided so cleanly. A French doom band drawing on that rejection for a closing track about contemporary society is not an unlikely move; rather a precise one.
DR: “Wrong is Right” closes the EP with that particular kind of inversion. What does it mean in the context of this record?
“Wrong is Right” is the antithesis of Manichaeism, the belief that the world divides cleanly into opposing forces of good and evil. Everything is not black or white. This is a sarcastic review of society, inspired by Saint Augustine. Our singer Nicolas would be better than me to explain this song. He can look a bit rough sometimes, but deeply he is a poet and a real lamb.
The Wrong City
The city they are building all of this in is its own kind of challenge. Angers has no established metal scene to lean on, no infrastructure of venues and audiences already primed for heavy music. Simon frames this as a source of pride rather than frustration, and there is something in that attitude that rhymes with the record itself. Astonishment was made without an easy path, by a young band in the wrong city for their genre. It arrived intact.
DR: What does the local scene look like from the inside?
Well, Angers isn’t really known for its metal scene, indeed. It makes it difficult to play shows in the city, but we see that there are always a lot of people at those events. It is also a kind of pride to play music that not everyone would play here. We didn’t choose the easy way, that’s for sure, but if one day we can put Angers on the map of doom metal, we would be really grateful.
DR: Where is Endeavour going from here?
We would like to play live as much as we can, to defend Astonishment. We are really proud of this record and it creates in us a huge desire of writing new songs, exploring things we haven’t so far. Maybe put some speed in our music. We have no boundaries and it will always sound like us at the end, so we really like to explore.
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Endeavour are two EPs in and the map of doom metal has not yet made room for Angers. Twenty minutes, for now, is enough.
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