Funeral doom, at its best, taps into something deeper than ordinary metal. These bands live and die by their ability to harness heavy emotion: sadness, longing, hopelessness, failure. It has a smothering effect — the weight of slow, stagnant rhythm guitars with strains of Aeolian leads that hang in the air like mist — it’s all meant to drag you down, hit you where it hurts, and force you to feel something. One of my favorite, and least common, funeral doom tricks comes when a band flips the script, letting the clouds break for a split second (which in funeral doom time means, like, three minutes). For a fleeting moment you get a glimpse of something resembling hope, a flickering light, perhaps the possibility of escape — and the feeling, the palpable sense of release, is monumental. It’s that moment of cathartic victory right before everyone dies at the end of a Senecan tragedy — awful, but somehow satisfying. Lycus achieves that here, painting in blood across a cosmic canvas. –Aaron [LISTEN]