Voivod has released the second single from its upcoming live album Symphonique, out June 5, 2026, via Century Media Records. “The End of Dormancy (Symphonique)” is now streaming across DSPs, accompanied by an official visualizer from Cloud Motion Design. The first single, “Forgotten in Space (Symphonique),” is also available.
Symphonique captures Voivod‘s June 4, 2025, performance at the Grand Théâtre in Québec City alongside the Orchestre Symphonique De Québec — a collaboration that fused the band’s pioneering futuristic metal with a full symphony orchestra across 12 songs and 73 minutes. Century Media describes the record as functioning like “an epic piece of cinema.”
Guitarist Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain on “The End of Dormancy (Symphonique)”: “This one is very special to me. I wrote the riffs imagining Roman naval battles with a full orchestra, like the movies from the ’50s and ’60s. It has a very dramatic vibe. Little did I know that what we synthesized for a four-piece band would eventually explode into its primary, original imagined form. It’s one of the most orchestral pieces on the album, and I remember the crowd’s reaction after the grand finale. It was one of these rare life’s perfect moments. I’m very grateful for that incredible experience.”
Drummer and founding member Michel “Away” Langevin said, “This live album with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra is a longtime dream turned reality. Thankfully, we will experience it again in 2027 with the Orchestre Symphonique du Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean, right in the region where Voivod formed back in 1983. We wish to take this show across the globe with local orchestras one day, but in the meantime, I hope you will enjoy this epic release. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to sounding like a dystopian sci-fi movie soundtrack, another dream of ours!”
The path that brought the collaboration to life was characteristically unlikely. In a December 2024 interview with The Metal Voice, Langevin recalled the odd chain of events: “It came through a strange chain of circumstances, where I did an interview for the magazine L’Itinéraire, for homeless people selling magazines on the street, and then I did an interview with one of the journalists for the magazine, and it ended up being published online by La Presse. And then the people directing the orchestra, the organization, they were made aware of that by one of the musicians from the orchestra, who is a metal dude and he’s a fan.”
Langevin continued: “It’s funny because since my cousin Richard Langevin is married to Diane Dufresne, a famous singer from Montreal, and she had done the orchestra before, so they got in touch with him, because I was mentioning him in the article because he showed me how to draw. [Laughs] And anyhow, they phoned Richard, my cousin, and he phoned my mother. [Laughs] And when I came back from touring with Voivod, I had a message on my answering machine saying that the orchestra were looking for us. So, quite amazing.” He added: “We didn’t approach [the orchestra], but we always talked about either doing symphonic shows or doing a soundtrack for a sci-fi movie or something like that. It’s part of the dreams we have.”
Mongrain, who previously arranged material for a brass quintet that performed with Voivod at the 2019 Montreal International Jazz Festival, worked closely with orchestrator Hugo Bégin on adapting the band’s music: “My help with the project was to provide the music sheets to the arranger, Hugo Bégin. He did an amazing job. He took the music sheet that I wrote for guitar and bass. So he had a template to work on. And so he orchestrated it for the whole orchestra and added his own color to it. And it’s very efficient. It’s like a movie soundtrack, like the movie we used to watch, like ‘Planet Of The Apes’ and ‘Ben-Hur’ and ‘Mad Max’ and all that. Voivod has been influenced since the beginning by those movies, so you can hear it, but with the whole orchestra, it’s very exciting… It’s gonna be grandiose.”
