(Here’s DGR’s review of the latest album by Rémi Gallego in his guise as The Algorithm – a record released last November.)
Last of the 2025 releases
Sometimes you cover artists purely because you want to have some sort of written record that you can backtrack to in order to follow how your opinion of them over the years has changed. It is this approach that has led to me consistently covering French electronica-metal-adjacent act The Algorithm as it has gone through its many permutations since the early 2010s.
The brainchild of musician Rémi Gallego, The Algorithm has gone through a series of transformations, matamorphising over time upon different themes as heavy metal evolved and various electronica genres sprang into existence. Describing The Algorithm as being a creature of pure absorbtion would be reductive, but instead it is one that has seen new forms as Rémi has traveled the world of music. Some releases have been jarringly abrasive, others far more danceable. Occasionally The Algorithm has dipped heavily into a complete synth-heavy nightmare and other times it has been freewheeling in its painterly approach.
From album to album, it’s never been clear what to expect – sometimes that statement even works for remix-to-remix with other collaborators – and it wasn’t until the releases of Compiler Optimization Techniques and Data Renaissance that it had seemed like The Algorithm had grown into its own artistic shoes.
It is in this that I find myself covering The Algorithm over and over again: not only for a sort of personal attempt at archiving an opinion of an artist over the years but also to track how a project has changed, grown, and even matured in that same time. It is why, now almost two and a half months into 2026, I’m taking one last look into 2025 through the lens of a project that skates along the surface of metal without becoming a full-blown metal act, and why I find myself continually fascinated with the genre-blurring at play in The Algorithm’s late-November of 2025 release Recursive Infinity.
The Algorithm is a project that to the best of its abilities has been crafting an overarching thematic story during its career. With the artistic limitations in place of very little vocalization or lyrics to spell things out, The Algorithm has evolved from a stellar nursery of ideas wherein any sort of inspiration could ignite an explosion of two or three songs into something that has cohered into a semi-controlled chaos. The results have often felt as if they were ghosts in the machine reaching outwards from any screen or speaker available to them to attempt contact with a living force of some kind.
The Algorithm has absorbed ideas from death metal proper in small doses, larger doses of the djent scene – given the artificial and laser-guided accuracy of the drums that are crafted, one can understand the draw here — and as of recent, massive passages of the post-metal world, while still keeping a core of short-circuiting and wire-bent electronic instrumentations. Songs by The Algorithm can just as easily bounce around as if backing a puzzle videogame soundtrack for minutes at a time before a sudden tone shift that brings the four walls of a building crashing down on top of them – this being the part where the metal guys get their meal servings in each album.
The Algorithm’s music has become more and more intertwined, dancing between current influential trends within the electronica and wider-techno music world and the aforementioned heavy metal fist of god reenacting Ulcerates’s Everything Is Fire conceptual cover art on any sort of peaceful composition. The Algorithm turned itself into an artisan with these techniques in the previously mentioned Compiler Optimization era of the project, and this continues wholeheartedly during Recursive Infinity – just with a lot more breakbeat rhythms than before, injecting some new vitality and semi-hopefulness into a project that has captured the art of sounding like a machine turning to philosophical nihilism and wandering into traffic.
Rémi has become criminally good at turning each album into a longform journey and Recursive Infinity is a prime example of that. Even though The Algorithm is mostly instrumental, there is that sense that the artist behind the veil is still speaking to you through each sudden jolt of a song. Events start stable enough in “Race Condition” and even have an air of homecoming to them when “Advanced Evasion Technique” takes the stage – the familiar ascending and descending synth line, utter chaos at its core, is a favored melodic tool of this project – yet some actual actual sung lyrics during “Endless Iteration” will no doubt turn some heads.
It’s infectiously catchy if nothing else, even as the song ascends and wraps back around its own neck and strangles itself during its ending. It has shades of what the electronica-duo of Bone Cult have been playing with, melding the disconnected and melodious nature of the vocal work with music far heavier than one would initially prescribe to it. This happens a few times across Recursive Infinity’s nine songs but everything with The Algorithm remains a tool to be wielded in service of a larger purpose rather than some new element that’ll soften this project around the edges and send it soaring up the charts. That doesn’t mean the mid-segment block of Recursive Infinity that ties around the aforementioned “Endless Iteration”, its wall-shaking follower “Graceful Degradation”, and the five and a half minute heavy metal and prog-rock chug of “Hollowing” won’t be the backing soundtrack to a few locked-in videogame sessions where the world be damned, in the future.
Recursive Infinity does manage to dovetail on its own concept as well; “By Design” resurrects the sung vocals for a bit, providing a somewhat secondary movement into a new musical suite for the back third of the album while also laying the groundwork for music to come. It lays down tracks for the truly ascendant “Rainbow Table” and the burst-at-the-seams pummeling of “Mutex” before finally wrapping the album up on the titular “Recursive Infinity” song.
Five minutes and twenty seconds isn’t nearly enough for The Algorithm to try and bookend or perform the “in summation” act of the Recursive Infinity album, but credit where credit is due, an attempt is made. The ascending and descending nature of the synth line that makes up the majority of the song is a meditative element, wherein it seems like our musical protagonist has escaped the constant energetic explosions of the previous eight songs and is finally allowed to dream a little. “Recursive Infinity” is calming in that sense, if it didn’t seem that by using a lot of the same ideas – just toned down and in a dreamlike fashion – that the first few songs on this album did that, this is a series of events forever cursed to loop back around on itself. Not that the album title wasn’t spelling it out for us true geniuses out there.
The Algorithm has situated itself on a few different genre-lines over the years, somehow blending them together in such a way that it is truly recognizable as belonging solely to this project. Even when mixed in and working alongside other artists, The Algorithm’s influence on the overall tightly-controlled chaos of any particular song is near-instantly recognizable. This is one of those projects that has aged into something fascinating and each release has an insane ability to just grab you and hold you in place – even when trying to describe it to people can make it sound fairly conventional. A long-running, mostly instrumental electronica project with a heavy emphasis on guitar work and occasional bursts of something far heavier?
Yet, albums like Recursive Infinity hammer the point home time and time again that The Algorithm is a truly interesting project that is well worth listening to. The nine songs here make up a much wider journey than what is portrayed, and the attempts to bend each song – sometimes by force – into the endlessly degrading loop that the album aims to describe are some of the more interesting stuff that landed at the tail end of 2025. Recursive Infinity for all of its genre-morphism and explosive-containment in musical form is a musical adventure worthy of embracing.
https://linktr.ee/thealgorithm
https://www.facebook.com/TheAlg0r1thm/