I once walked into a Sunn O))) show with a hangover, and I walked out feeling much better. If you hear the band’s ambient drone-metal rumble loud enough — and if you’re going to see them life, you are definitely hearing it loud enough — it has a measurable physical effect on you. You feel the band’s time-stretching bass tones in your ribcage, in your heart, in your stomach, in your liver. You feel your entire nervous system adjusting to their sense of time, their state of reality. Their music gets inside you.

Next week, Sunn O))) will follow up 2015’s Kannon with a new album that bears the perfect title Life Metal. The band — notorious for wearing ringwraith robes onstage, and for performing in clouds of fog, in front of gigantic stacks of amps — recorded the album directly to tape in Chicago. Steve Albini, a man who knows how to shape loud sounds, recorded it. People like Icelandic singer/cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir and Silkworm/Bottomless Pit frontman Tim Midyett made contributions.

The album plays out, like pretty much every Sunn O))) album, as an enveloping cloud of doom. But it’s warmer and less apocalyptically dark than past records from the band. There are moments, especially on opening track “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths,” where they go for straight-up beauty. They also take their time; there are only four tracks on the 68-minute album. Right now, NPR is streaming Life Metal, and you can listen to the album here.

Life Metal is out 4/26 on Southern Lord, and Sunn O))) also plan to release another album called Pyroclasts later in the year. Read our interview with the band here.