If you’ve been following along at all, you’ve probably noticed that I have a deep love for weird metal. Particularly, heavy metal that looses itself from the macho tropes that have conventionally marred metal music and stretches beyond the rigid confines of the genre. Bands like Alcest, Deafheaven, Isis, Spotlights…the list goes on.

The Boston outfit Astronoid hits every single one of those buttons—and then some.

While the group’s early lived in a conventional (yet excellent) blackgaze a la Alcest, Les Discrets, et al, on Air they create their own subgenre that they call “dream thrash.” And as pretentious as that might sound, it completely captures their unique blend of styles—and I’m here for it. Their instrumentation has all of the trademark tropes of thrash: machine gun drum beats, rapidfire riffage, and hair-metal-ready, harmonized guitar solos.

But singer Brett Boland has none of the grit-throated aggression of thrash vocalists. His voice is cleaner than clean, coated in reverb, soaring delicately above the relentless thrum of the instruments. His melodies are anthemic and cinematic.

And strangely, the combination of thrash instruments and Boland’s uber-melodicism creates some pretty interesting byproducts. It hits a lot of the same sentimental notes as a lot of the emo outfits and melodic pop-punk bands I was listening to in the early 2000s, like Jimmy Eat World and Blink-182. “Resin” specifically sounds a bit like what would happen if Rufio were a metal band. “Homesick” brings the tempo down a bit and lands somewhere around Circa Survive before launching into a pinch-harmonic laden solo that would make Kirk Hammet grin.

But for all of the emo and pop-punk notes, this is absolutely a metal record. “Up and Atom” opens with a riff that could pass for traditional speed metal, if it weren’t for Boland’s gorgeous falsetto. The title track features one of the most furious double-kick parts you could ever hope for.

This marriage of metal and melody is hardly unique these days. Bands have been rushing to appropriate metal’s power ever since Sunbather broke the Billboard 200. But few bands actually deliver on that formula with rewarding results. Air is successful because it takes notes from that equation without Xeroxing it, offering an album that achieves the same staggering heights without ever sounding like a cheap copy.