As much as I love metal, I don’t usually mess around with technical death metal. By and large, I’m not totally interested in musical pissing contests to see how fast and brutal a band can play.

But I’ve faced a new mystery lately. I’ve had trouble sleeping on and off my whole life, and while it’s not a new thing for me to wake up in the middle of the night, it is a new thing for me to wake up to vinyl purchases that I don’t remember making. These purchases are usually albums that I’ve been meaning to listen to but haven’t yet. The first was Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and for the most part, my subconscious purchases have been on a hot streak.

So when I woke up to this order, I thought perhaps Sleepytime Nat had finally stumbled. After all, he should know I’m not into tech death, right?

But to my surprise, this album is staggering. Blood Incantation manages to avoid the pitfalls that ensnare so many of their contemporaries. They don’t abandon the conventions of the genre, but they aren’t limited by them either. They stretch into ambient, psychedelic, and prog, creating an album that feels truly transcendental.

Looking at the Bruce Pennington album art (taken from the cover of the book Time and Nathaniel, hey!), sprawling lyrics, and vinyl packaging, Hidden History’s transcendental nature shouldn’t come as a surprise. The lyrics dive deep into philosophical, metaphysical, and supernatural. The lyric sheet is littered with references to Gnostic philosophers, studies on brain chemistry, and unexplained astrophysical phenomenon. There are lines like “Night opens the gates of space, to make the Earth a flying staron which we travel through the ALL” and “Sow the seeds of suffering to break the chains of consciousness for he who’s called Yalbadaoth.”

The booklet that accompanies the record (titled, “Stargate Research Society presents: A medititave inquiry on the Mystery & Nature of human consciousness, as revealed by Blood Incantation”) is filled with conspiracy-theory like collages, defaced photographs of historical figures, politicians, and archeological finds are branded with phrases like “BLOOD INCANTATION ARE TIME TRAVELERS. THEY ARE RETURNING YOU TO THE COSMOS.” The same booklet includes a list of suggested reading to open your mind, including studies into DMT, the works of Jung and Carl Sagan, and the Tibetan Books of the Dead. The next page features mock ads for supernatural and extraterrestrial products and services.

It’s one thing to wax philosophical about transcending the limits of human consciousness. Plenty of stoners have dropped acid and attempted to write great psychedelic opuses, only for the finished product to be either entirely pedestrian or entirely unlistenable. It’s quite another to write an album that sounds like you’ve actually stretched beyond life and death. And dare I say, Blood Incantation has achieved that end. There is something prophetic about this record, like someone who has pulled back the curtain of our perceptions and has come back to describe it to us.

But most importantly, Hidden History sounds transcendent in a musical sense as well. And with so few boundaries left to break in music, that’s no easy feat. Very few death metal records have credits that include Moog, Roland Jupiter 8, Acoustic & Electric Fretless basses, and Tamboura. But it’s not just a matter of shifting frantically from one sound to the next. The album has a unified vision, even between its most chaotic and atmospheric passages. This is most obviously seen in the sprawling, 18-minute opus “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)” that closes the album. It opens with the conventional tech death brutality, shifting between tempos and meters until it collapses into a wash of ambient synthesizers. It shifts between these two poles for several minutes until it shifts into an emotive guitar solo that approaches arena rock grandeur, fading away into an acoustic finale. But for all of its shapeshifting, “Awakening…” never sounds unfocused. Rather, every step is taken with complete intention—testament to the three-year-plus writing process.

It comes as no surprise that such an ambitious album came through such a monstrous writing process. The band allegedly wrote parts that they weren’t able to play, and then tightened it up in marathon practice sessions. That’s not difficult to believe when you hear the machine gun riffing and whiplash changes on opener “Slave Species of the Gods.”

But the moment that really made this album click for me is the more ambient instrumental third track, “Inner Paths (to Outer Space)“—which the band claims they improvised and revised over months while they were all on psychedelics. But listening to the slow build from ambient to psychedelic to doom to full-on death metal assault, it’s not hard to believe that they would need some help shedding their preconceived notions of how these musical forms are meant to fit together.

Vocalist/rhythm guitarist Paul Reidl summarized this album as an attempt to create “a genuine and distinctive album of monumental and epic psychedelic/brutal/progressive/technical/ambient/funeral death metal like no other.” Claims like that are usually delivered with high levels of pretentiousness and unearned ambition, and they usually fail to deliver on a fraction of what they promise. But in this case, Reidl was right on the money. This is a special record, at once monstrous and inviting, like an Old Testament angel covered in wings and eyes inviting you to abandon the smallness of your life and step into the full glory of the Unknowable.