For about a decade, the Austrian duo Harakiri For The Sky have been fusing black metal rage-growl with reaching-for-transcendence post-rock, and they are extremely good at it. A lot of bands have been trying to combine those sounds in recent years, and many of those bands are great. But Harakiri Sky belong on a small list, with the Deafheavens and Alcests and Envys of the world, of the very best of them. Still, I’m not sure anything in Harakiri For The Sky’s past prepared me for the soaring grandeur of their new album Mӕre. This thing is absolutely overwhelming me. I’m in awe.

Mӕre is named, per the Bandcamp page, after “a malicious folkloristic entity creeping on sleeping people’s chest during the night and causing breathlessness and anxiety.” The new album is the follow-up to 2018’s Arson. (Under the name Karg, one half of the duo also released a really great album called Traktat in 2019.) Mӕre is a vast album, its 10 songs sprawled out over an immersive 85-minute running time. Most of the time, when I see that an album is that long, I dismiss it as sheer indulgence. With this one, I almost wish it was longer.

Harakiri For The Sky belong to a subgenre known as depressive suicidal black metal, and there’s something hugely reassuring about the punishing beauty that they conjure on this album. The heavy parts of Mӕre are heavy, but there’s a whole lot of melody on the album, too. Stretches of it are given over to twinkling, impressionistic folk music; other stretches sound like fists-up emotive arena rock. There’s also a cover of Placebo’s “Song To Say Goodbye,” which is nuts. The whole thing is really hitting me in the gut this morning, and I encourage you to give it 85 minutes of your time. Stream the album below.

Mӕre is out now on AOP Records.