One of my favorite things about music history is that no matter how deep you dig, there’s always another jewel to discover. As much as I love the ethereal, crushing heaviness of bands like Holy Fawn, Spotlights, Palehorse/Palerider, and the throng of other bands often labeled “doomgaze,” I never heard of the apparent pioneers of that sound until last week.

But once I did, their swan song Weighing the Souls with Sand immediately grabbed me with its rich atmospheres and overwhelming heaviness.

As the story goes, married couple Kris Angylus and Monica Henson (billed as M. Dragynfly) formed The Angelic Process in the early 2000s. They sought to combine the dark broodiness of Neurosis with the lush, glittering textures of My Bloody Valentine. Kris would use a violin bow to achieve a thicker sound, often singing with a soft, drowsy croon instead of screaming (though there is some of that).

Weighing the Souls with Sand, their third full length, finds them at their most fully formed. The songs are dark and mysterious, the vocals barely intelligible under the shimmering murk. When the drums aren’t being drowned out by the impossibly loud guitars, they play warlike rhythms, marching the songs to battle through dirge-like tempos. The song structures are long and patient. Most of the songs exceed five minutes, with several of them lasting much longer.

The  “The Promise of Snakes” is a perfect introduction. Somber swells of chords pillow gently, joined by a tom-figure on the drums. Two minutes into the track, low crunching chords burst in, joined by clean vocals, exploding into a white-hot burst of white noise and atmosphere-smothering heaviness. The rest of the track plays with extremes, juxtaposing darkly gorgeous atmospheres with blistering walls of noise for its nine and a half minute run time. By the time it fades into the brief (in comparison) “Million Year Summer,” you know exactly what you’re getting into.

The Disc 1, Side B centerpiece, “Dying in A-Minor” is similarly stunning. It builds layers of atmosphere on top of eachother, drowning soft ethereal vocals in reverb like a sort of netherworld Sigur Rós. A sparse drum figure plods as the song swells, suddenly exploding five and a half minutes in. The song burns down around a repeated thick chord progression, dying down for a moment before the title track comes in with the most straightforward rock song on the disc, featuring a hi-hat driven drum groove (a rare occasion on this disc) and breakdown ready riffs.

Disc 2 opens with the two-minute instrumental “Mouvement – World Deafening Eclipse,” which sounds almost joyful until crashes of distorted-beyond-recognition guitars interrupt. “Burning in the Undertow of God” (what a song title) features a near metalcore breakdown, alternating between detuned chugs and panic chords—that is, if a metalcore breakdown was played at half speed.

This remastered vinyl edition (which I discovered the band just in time for) also includes the CD edition’s hidden track “How To Build a Time Machine,” which takes their juxtoposition of soft and loud sections to its extreme and the vinyl-exclusive track “Sleepwritten,” an eleven-minute instrumental opus as patient as as heavy as anything else on the record, integrating rich use of electronics.

It’s a darkly beautiful record, though I discovered after falling in love with it that it carries a tragic story. The oft-unintelligble vocals explore the death of a spouse, which unfortunately became fitting a year later. Shortly after Weighing was released, guitarist/vocalist/drummer Kris Angylus suffered an accident, causing him to lose the use of one of his hands. The severity of the injury put The Angelic Process on indefinite hiatus. The loss sent him into a spiral, and a few months later he succumbed to his depression. While the story isn’t necessary to fall in love with this record, once you know it his ghost stretches a long shadow on this record—especially on tracks like “We All Die Laughing.”