Last month, Metallica announced plans for The Metallica Blacklist, a crazy and ambitious project in which 53 different artists would try their hands at covering songs from the self-titled Metallica blockbuster known universally as the “Black Album.” We’ve posted a few of those covers as they’ve come out, and they have been wild rides. Jason Isbell, St. Vincent, and OFF! have all submitted their versions of Metallica songs, and now Diet Cig have stepped into the fray, as well.

Diet Cig, the fuzzed-out indie-pop duo currently based in Richmond, have taken on “The Unforgiven,” the grandly heavy power ballad that was all over rock radio in the early ’90s. That song, with its crashing chords and melodramatic strings and fluttery acoustic guitars and Hetfieldian growls, does not seem like something that would fit within Diet Cig’s skillset, but I am pleased to report that Diet Cig have made “The Unforgiven” their own.

Diet Cig, who released their album Do You Wonder About Me?, start out “The Unforgiven” with bleepy synths, which marks a pretty striking change from the Metallica original. But once the guitars kick in, the Diet Cig version of the song gets impressively dramatic. Diet Cig, it appears, understood that their Metallica cover needed to rock. They pulled it off. Listen to their version and check out the video for Metallica’s original below.

The Metallica Blacklist is out 9/10, and you can pre-order it here.