You don’t necessarily have to be familiar with Princess Mononoke to fully appreciate the latest Alcest album, Kodama, but it doesn’t hurt. The French band’s LP takes its title from the tree spirits in Hayao Miyazaki’s landmark animated feature, but Alcest singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Neige says it’s the film’s general message, and not the specifics of its plot, that inspired him.

“I’m a big Miyazaki fan, and I love this movie,” says Neige, calling from a tour stop in Iowa City, Iowa. “The themes of the movie are having a very special resonance in me, and I think in a lot of people too, because it’s speaking about this conflict between nature and the humans and their technology. I think it’s a really contemporary thing, because that’s what we are living now, and if we are just focused on our little problems, then we forget that there is a whole world around us that we don’t really care about, and that we have to respect and protect and everything, because if we mess up too much, we will just disappear.”

Given that the lyrics are mostly in French (apart from the odd diversion into nonlexical vocables) nonfrancophone listeners might have a hard time picking up on the environmental theme of Kodama. In translation, however, “Oiseaux de Proie” unmistakably delineates the conflict between humankind and the spirits of the natural world: “The wounded earth/Ill at heart/Rumbles and pours/Volcanic breath/The birds of prey/A beast-children army/Preparing to avenge/Their mother’s agony.”

Even if one has no idea what Neige (who occasionally answers to the more mundane name Stéphane Paut) is singing about, Alcest’s music is sufficiently cinematic in scope to evoke an intense emotional response. The delay-treated guitars, soaring keyboard melodies, and keening vocals add up to a powerful wall of sound that only occasionally hints at the project’s roots in the black-metal underground. That legacy is evident in Neige’s throat-shredding screaming on “Éclosion” and “Je Suis d’Ailleurs” and the neck-snapping blast beat that brings “Oiseaux de Proie” to its revenge-of-the-birds climax.

Such elements are used sparingly on Kodama, and were entirely absent from its immediate predecessor, 2014’s Shelter, which was the result of Neige and drummer Winterhalter recording at Sigur Rós’s studio in Iceland and exploring a dreamier, more atmospheric sound.

“I knew that I wanted to make a nonmetal record, with no metal elements at all,” Neige recalls. “But on the other side, it wasn’t, like, prepared, you know? I mean, I didn’t think, ‘Okay, the next record is going to be completely soft.’ I think it was a reaction to the record before. After Les Voyages de l’Âme, the record that was before Shelter, I think I was a bit fed up with metal sounds. We’d done it for several albums and I wanted to try something very different. And I was listening to a lot of Slowdive and Cocteau Twins, all of these bands from 4AD. It’s the shoegaze record of Alcest.”

The band’s wide-ranging influences have earned it a diverse following; Neige says Alcest’s concerts draw everyone from teenagers to retirees, with headbangers rubbing elbows with hipsters. Given that fact, you might reason that Hayao Miyazaki himself might very well appreciate Kodama—but Neige doesn’t want to know.

“In Japan, he’s a god, you know,” the Paris-based musician says. “He is one of the most famous Japanese people in the world, I think, so I think he has much better things to do than listening to this underground band. Actually, I don’t think I would like him to hear it, because it’s so minor compared to what this guy is doing. This guy, for me, he’s the greatest artist of our time.”

Alcest plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Saturday (February 4).