My favourite period of art is Romanticism, and it's not even close. A response to the hegemony of Enlightenment ideals and beliefs, Romanticism advocated for subjectivity, beauty, passion, and an appreciation for nature. This was almost a complete 180 from the Enlightenment, which placed value on rationality, objectivity, and empiricism. Romanticism was all but dead in the water by the start of the 1900s, when rapid technological change and social upheaval marked the modernist period, in some ways a coda to Enlightenment ideals from 100 years before.

These ideals seem to swing back and forward as in a pendulum (one might even say, a dialectic…), and although we had a bit of a detour in the middle of the 20th century (with various postmodern schools of thought and art), I feel as though certain Romantic ideals are beginning to be espoused once again. Perhaps it's in response to what is clearly an untenable economic system for the survival of our planet. Or maybe it's the giving way of the techno-optimism that ruled much of the 90s and 00s - replaced with a growing (justified) distrust of a digital panopticon that has been fine-tuned to make us all miserable all the time. The ironic, self-referential, un-seriousness of the Postmodern era has become gauche. We are swinging back to sincerity, though interspersed with postmodern moments of irony and self-awareness.

Les chants de l'aurore, the 7th album from France's Alcest is a celebration of The Sublime. Lush soundscapes evoke imagery of otherworldly, ethereal landscapes. Snowy mountains, tree-filled valleys, hilly plains bathed in golden light, a still lake at sunrise. Nothing made by man can replicate the feeling stirred when looking out across a grand vista. Like Alcest's other work, it feels self-serious - but not in an off-putting way. Epic and grand, yet deeply personal and spiritual. There's an appreciation for beauty in here, and it does sound beautiful, with walls of sound accompanied by soaring guitar lines and airy vocals (and punctuated with the occasional blast beat - as a treat).

Beauty is everywhere for those who look for it. Capitalist Realism is our reality, but our way forward lies in passion. To create, unhampered, unbothered. To rediscover the sublime. To experience the world subjectively, on our own terms, without judgement or fear of 'not doing it right'. Our reality can't be approximated by a million trillion 1s and 0s fed to us through Earth's greatest plagiarism machine. Trust your senses, trust your gut, but don't blindly trust the supposed rationality of the technocratic class. They can't quantify awe, they can't quantify beauty. The world is alive. C'est l'essence de «Les chants de l'aurore».