Genre alchemy gets into diminishing returns pretty quickly. While fusion was once incredibly revolutionary, the internet has hastened the pace of these reactions so that there’s almost no crossover that hasn’t been tried.

We’re almost two decades past the advent of Girl Talk, whose genre-defying mashups saw acts like Fleetwood Mac, Ludacris, The Ramones, Lil Missy, Radiohead, Jay-Z, and Metallica featured on the same track. Babymetal debuted eleven years ago. Ill-conceived chimeras like crunkcore and emo rap are now old enough to vote. Then you have the entire crop of bands blending metal with shoegaze, post-rock, spirituals, and even Azerbaijani folk music.

Genre-bending alone isn’t enough to make compelling music.

So it’s a good thing that Ultrapop has much more to its credit, because this is one of the freshest takes on genre fusion in a long time.

The Armed is an anonymous collective comprised of as few as eight and as many as eleven members. A few of their identities have been revealed, but there’s some speculation about the veracity of those revelations (or instance, are the people in the video for “All Futures” actually members of the band or just actors?). Ultrapop, their fourth album and first undeniable breakthrough release, shifts between electronica, post-hardcore, R&B, extreme metal, hyperpop, and noise rock.

The combination of faceless, rotating collaborators and unpredictable genre hopping  could make for an untethered mess of an album. But somehow, through all the chaotic, shapeshifting maximalism, Ultrapop manages to keep a distinct, cohesive voice. Multiple guitarists (and likely multiple bassists) trade riffs while a gang of vocalists shift from hardcore screams to melodic clean vocals to cheerleader chants. The drums play more fills than grooves while walls of synthesizers fill every empty space.

It is truly a work of nonstop sonic maximalism. It is a wall of sound as massive as a tsunami, and just as devastating. If any of my descriptions make it sound like an exhausting listen, that’s not far off. This isn’t for everybody, and for the first several months of my familiarity with it, it wasn’t for me either. But then I started to see the individual ripples glistening off the surface of the wave. It’s still overwhelming, but it feels less destructive and more kaleidoscopic. There’s something new to hear with every listen as the different sonic layers peel back to reveal the next.

None of that would matter as much if the songs weren’t so carefully constructed. Nothing about this record sounds haphazard, even at its most overwhelming. Rhythms and melodies are piled high on top of one another to dizzying heights, but it never teeters, even when the aural architecture suggests a complete defiance of gravity.

The album runs through its twelve tracks in a blistering thirty-nine minutes, but it’s dense enough to feel far more massive. It makes more of an impact than some double albums, and the more-is-more approach to the tracks almost demands further inspection to figure out what the hell is going on here. It’s an absolutely wild ride, but a rewarding one.