As black metal evolves into newer and weirder sonic and thematic terrains, Sweden’s fearsome and amazing Watain continue to toil in the same poisoned ground from which the music first grew. The band offers swirling, suffocating, hook-driven black metal that draws from the very best in the genre’s history — Dissection, Immortal, Morbid Angel — with lyrics focusing on rituals, witches, devils, and demons. (Euronymous would surely approve.) They’ve become sort of infamous for their stage show — which involves animal carcasses and stinks to high heaven (er, low hell?) — but that infamy has overshadowed their songwriting, which uses classic elements to achieve astonishing results. Beneath the corpsepaint, Watain are meticulous craftsmen; their structural perfectionism seems almost uniquely Swedish. Their fifth LP, The Wild Hunt, is their biggest and most ambitious, even including two songs with clean singing (they sound a bit like late-period Bathory). First single “All That May Bleed,” though, is searing, blood-raising Scandinavian black metal. Of course it’s great. Listen.

The Wild Hunt tracklist:

01 “Night Vision”
02 “De Profundis”
03 “Black Flames March”
04 “All That May Bleed”
05 “The Child Must Die”
06 “They Rode On”
07 “Sleepless Evil”
08 “The Wild Hunt”
09 “Outlaw”
10 “Ignem Veni Mittere”
11 “Holocaust Dawn”

The Wild Hunt is out 8/20 via Century Media.