Black metal with post-rock and shoegaze tendencies. San Francisco band. Recorded in East Palo Alto. Full of anguish, heartache, and utter ecstasy in equal measure. Too huge for words. This is music for flipping tables, bawling your eyes out, telling all your friends how much you love them, &c &c &c. Some metal purists have thumbed their noses at this because it’s gotten attention from the usual tastemakers, but when the music’s this overpoweringly beautiful who really gives a damn. Incredible. Favorites: 1, 3, 5. FCC WARNING: 6.

1. **(9:15)—(Segues into track two.) Blast-beats, zillions of major-key guitars. Fast fast fast. Keeps changing but always building in intensity. Brief, soft passage of only guitar. Then a sonic explosion. Slow crawl up to total rapture. Singer sounds like he’s screaming “Yeah!” over and over, and considering how triumphant this feels, I’d be fine if those were the only lyrics. Song of the year.
2. (3:13)—Soothing instrumental coda to the previous track. Slow, ringing, intertwining guitars. Piano. Careful—gets pretty quiet starting at -0:30.
3. *(10:17)— Meditation on social class (if you can make out the lyrics). Slow, giant shoegaze beginning. Brief soft section. Fast fast fast blast beats. Ripping guitar lead. Takes a turn for the menacing. Speed increases and decreases multiple times. Trippy guitars, final head-crushing onslaught.
4. (6:26)—No drums. Waves of spaced-out, ominous guitars. Member of Alcest reads from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harsh noise. Sudden shift to multiple tracks of guitar strumming.
5. *(14:37)—Chill, mid-tempo, melancholy intro. Picks up energy slowly, kicks down the tempo. Launches into vocals, blast-beats around -9:30. As the band shifts from heavy passage to heavy passage, the music gets sadder and sadder and sadder. And then it slows and reaches absolute misery in the most cathartic way possible.
6. (4:43)—FCC WARNING (f***, maybe others buried in the mix). Instrumental, no drums. Queasy guitars, spooky piano. Recordings of conversations, a street sermon.
7. (11:27)—Jumps right in to blast-beats, walls of guitars, screaming. The softer mid-section of this reminds me strongly of The Appleseed Cast’s Low Level Owl. Brief, ultra-buried spoken word section—probably no FCCs. Build to a victorious, mid-tempo, major-chord climax, then slow fade.