It’s no secret that I have a very, very weak spot in my heart for music that blends metal’s punishing heaviness with unabashed prettiness. And the last few years (more specifically, ever since Sunbather brought further attention to the type of gorgeous metal that Alcest pioneered) scores of metal bands have been pushing into the dreamy lushness of shoegaze and post rock—and vice versa.

But few bands do it with the sort of shameless simplicity of Holy Fawn. And thus, few bands do it with as much success.

Holy Fawn’s bio across all avenues of social media reads simply, “four creatures making loud, pretty noises.” And for it’s brevity, I’m not sure that human language can be manipulated in such a way to describe it more accurately.

“Dark Stone” opens the record like a manifesto. Pad-like guitar ambience is punctuated with bursts of earth-shattering bass fuzz. Ultra-clean, gender ambiguous vocals (it’s a male voice, but I thought it was a woman until I bought the record and saw the band photo) barely whisper over an otherworldly dream poppy verse, exploding into a mic-clipping scream under the chaos of cymbal crashes and feedback in the song’s climax. It almost feels as if it’s laying out the formula that the whole album will take: one part billowing atmospheres and gorgeous melodies, one part heavier-than-heavy sludge; combine in a highball glass and allow for separation, then serve.

At times, it even feels like they’re playing a game, trying to see just how delicate they can make a song, then how loud they can make it before it collapses. But identifying the formula doesn’t make it any less surprising. On the contrary: this is one of the most satisfying pretty/heavy releases in years. And as the album goes on, it remains as consistent as the devastating one-two punch of “Dark Stone” and “Arrows.”

“Yawning” pulses along at an urgent tempo and jangling guitar arpeggio that could almost be straight ahead post-punk if it weren’t for the hellacious burst of noise at the chorus. The patient, seven-minute “Take Me With You” feels like a warped version of Sigur Ros, the instruments barely breaking the hazy aural fog until the explosion in the final minutes. You might be able to convince an unsuspecting listener that “Vespertine” is a new Beach House track (see again: gender ambiguous vocals), until the song erupts in a wall of molten guitar noise. But somehow, even the more overt dream pop of that track doesn’t feel out of place alongside the sludgier moments. A pair of lush instrumental segues punctuate the second half of the record, giving sublime reprieve from the louder moments.

But if you thought the record was slowing down in the back half, closer “Sleep Tongue” assuages that fear. After a billowing, ethereal start, the band kicks in with a dreamy post-punk riff that collapses under the weight of fuzzed bass, guitar distortion, crashing cymbals, and metal screams.

Sonically, this record is absolutely gorgeous. Having tried my hand at production myself, I know how difficult it is to make a record sound consistently good through major dynamic shifts. And the group knows exactly what their doing—exemplified by the fact that they mixed and mastered the record themselves. And on wax, it sounds as stunning as I could have hoped for. The headphone-ready nuances of the atmosphere aren’t lost even as they blare across my living room. And this record will spend plenty of time blaring across my living room. In the last month, no record has spent as much time playing on my turntable or in my car (even though my car speakers butcher the walls of noise), and it hasn’t lost any of its freshness.