For someone who is as heavily into glacial, sludgy, female-fronted metal as I am, it might come as a shock to hear that I never heard about Big Brave until a couple months ago when I found myself with an advanced copy of their newest album to review. But within seconds of the opening track “Abating the Incarnation of Matter,” I was already on their site ordering this record. Immediately after I finished the review, I tracked down a copy of their earlier album A Gaze Among Them.

All that to say. This record is great.

Big Brave is a three piece, but you wouldn’t know it by the enormous size of their sound. The drums pound mercilessly along like its leading a lumbering army of giants into battle. But they are practically dwarfed by the guitars and bass that deliver a massive onslaught that shifts between larger-than-life chord crashes, singing feedback, and ambient washes. If it tells you anything about the way they treat sound, the credits list the amplifiers as if they were separate instruments.

Instrumentally alone, the disc is absolutely stunning. But vocalist Robin Wattie makes it absolutely transcendent. Her voice soars on powerful lungs, refusing to be buried by the mountain of noise. And it’s a good thing too, because these words are too important. She speaks of the cultural abuses she’s faced both as a minority and a woman with staggering clarity. In “Half Breed” she bellows an excerpt from “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” by Alexander Chee: “[the] Pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture; historically we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have.” It’s heavy stuff on paper, but put to bursting guitar amplifiers, it’s even more arresting.

“Of This Ilk” speaks out against the global practice of skin bleaching. “The shame of the want of a vessel so ‘pure,’ so ‘clear.'” She punctuates these scholarly lines with the lines, “I want to be you” and “I need to be you,” a stark confession of the pressures that lead darker skinned individuals to mutilate themselves.

It’s not all hopeless though: “Wited. Still and All” opens with the lines “Hack at the fat of my breast. I belong only where you think I’m from. And yet, I have love.” For all of the isolation and violence she has faced because of the cultural definitions drawn around her identity, there is still hope.

As heavy as the record is—both sonically and lyrically—it should surprise no one that it takes its time. Three of the five songs stretch past the nine-minute mark. “Abating the Incarnation of Matter” is around 70 beats per minute, but it feels practically urgent compared to the rest (best I can tell, “Vital” is around 45bpm. But the bursts of chords and swells of ambience are arresting enough that the record never feels like it’s wasting time.  Rather, it is patient, knowing that important things can’t be rushed. And this record is certainly important.