Les Attitudes Spectrales was co-founded by Frenchman Julien Stark and his Latvian wife Rūta in 2014. They have released two lo-fi albums – Floral Wreck (2014) and Where’s my Ghost Milk? (2015) – before expanding into a four-piece and releasing Vampire in the Summer (2019) and the award-nominated Songs For No One (2022) on vinyl through boutique French label Specific Recordings. They have resisted outside pressure from locals to sing in Latvian or French and against the odds become one of the most influential bands in Riga, despite singing in English. Their idiosyncratic take on psychedelic rock, slacker rock and post-hardcore is so powerful and unifying that most, who are looking to blame something for the influx of Anglicisms in the Latvian language, recognise that this band is the wrong target. And with their fifth album their most fearless and heaviest to-date, the consensus around Les Attitudes Spectrales being a generational talent making some of the best music the Latvian alternative scene has ever known is growing. Remember their name, they won’t be a regional best kept secret for long.

Les Attitudes Spectrales are: Rūta Stark (bass, vocals) Julien Stark (guitars, vocals) Adrians Grīns (guitars) Mārtiņš Kuzmins (drums).

“I’ve tried to be a bit more courageous and open a bit more on this album,” adds Julien. “The band’s name Les Attitudes Spectrales is derived from a poem by Andre Breton, who is famous for surrealist, automatic writing and it’s a technique I’ve frequently relied upon. But I now think it’s a way of avoiding responsibility for what you’ve written.”

The album, Julien admits, is dark. And the title Watch The Sword About To Drop – if we’re to Americanize it – translates to ‘shit is about to hit the fan.’ Amid the current geopolitical upheaval and the intensifying convergence of crises, it’s a title that captures the zeitgeist and at the same time reflects the very personal crises that they were facing at the time of writing. That said, their sense of humour is intact – a case in point is ‘Untintersting Corpse, No One Is Listening’, the result of a spoof-y challenge to write the bleakest song possible.

To record the album, the band headed to Studija Gateris, which was formerly in a loft conversion in Riga but is now operating out of a large barn conversion in the lofty suburb of Mārupe. It was mastered by Lomix at Hodila Studio in Valmiera, Latvia. Les Attitudes Spectrales were the first band to make an album in the new Studija Gateris and developed a cohesive relationship with owner and recording engineer Jānis Kalvāns, who gave them all the time they needed (between October 2025 and January 2026) and encouraged unusual recording techniques. He had a Beach Boys-esque approach of trying everything to see if it works and subtracting later if it doesn’t work. “It was the first time in my life where I made a record and at the end I got to do everything I wanted. It’s also the first of our records where I like the way that every track has turned out,” says Julien. 

The 10-track album Watch The Sword About To Drop is slated for release on 26 May 2026.