Today, the long-running, Lord Of The Rings-obsessed Austrian black metal duo Summoning release their eighth album With Doom We Come. If you somehow missed that this was happening, don’t feel bad. With Doom We Come isn’t even the most prominent black metal album to come out today; that’d be Watain’s Trident Wolf Eclipse. But With Doom We Come is an absolute motherfucking monster, among the best 2018 albums I’ve heard yet, and you should really go out of your way to listen to it.

Summoning are pioneers in the field of ambient, atmospheric black metal, and With Doom We Come is a rich, symphonic piece of work. It’s got all the raspy goblin-scream vocals and decaying guitars that you expect from black metal, but it’s also gut lush, twinkling pianos and mournful horns and samples that are apparently from the Lord Of The Rings movies but sound like they’re from video games.

Summoning have been at this for a long time — their first album came out in 1995 — but I was completely ignorant about them before reading about them in a recent Black Market column. I’ve never really heard anything like this albums. If Sergei Eisenstein had somehow lived to make ’70s horror movies, this album might sound like the score to one of those. Or if we discovered fascistic civilizations on alien planets, these songs might be the national anthems. It’s just awesome, in both senses of the word, and you can stream it below.

"With Doom We Come," the new album by Summoning, one of my favorite bands of all time, is out today. Please buy it and give Summoning the #1 album they deserve.

— The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats) January 5, 2018

With Doom We Come is out now on Napalm Records.