Back in 2018, Unreqvited, the one-man black metal project spearheaded by a mysterious Ottawa man who goes by the name 鬼, released a gloriously beautiful album called Mosaic I: L’Amour Et L’Ardeur. Unreqvited makes a particularly atmospheric, feelings-first form of black metal — I’ve often seen it filed under the alarming genre name depressive suicidal black metal — and Mosaic I was so pretty that it only rarely even sounded anything like metal. Today, Unreqvited has followed that album up with the new LP Mosaic II: La Détesse Et La Détresse, which sounds, at least to my relatively untrained ears, even less like metal.

The music on Mosaic II occasionally reaches for blearily triumphant rock. Most of the time, though, it draws on tingly and emotional post-rock of the Explosions In The Sky variety and woozy, overwhelmed ambient music. There’s a lot of beauty on the largely instrumental Mosaic II, and there’s also a lot of suffocated grandiosity.

Mosaic II is darker and heavier than Mosaic I — not “heavier” in the big-crushing-riffs sense, but heavier in the sense that it’s full of stressful scrapes and drones and hums. It’s a tougher hang. But if you’re in the right headspace, it’s another internal journey from an artist who brings enough gravity to suck you in. Listen to the album below.

Mosaic II: La Détesse Et La Détresse is out now, and you can get it at Bandcamp.