I’m starting to worry that my weak spot for noisy, crushing shoegaze is going to become fatal. Sometimes, I’ll hear a few seconds of fuzzy guitars with washed out vocals and start frantically searching for vinyl copies online.

That happened last week when I came upon Airs, the now-defunct “Loudest Band in San Francisco” on a playlist on Spotify and scoured the internet, eventually purchasing what seemed to be the only copy for sale online. In fact, given that Apart is the only release from Airs that saw a vinyl release, this was the only Airs wax for sale on the whole internet.

And I had to have it.

Oddly enough, the playlist I discovered them on was one of Spotify’s curated Blackgaze playlists, the mixture of black metal, shoegaze, and post rock founded by Alcest and popularized by Deafheaven. Alcest was name dropped in a few different reviews as well.

But if there’s anything black about their gaze on other releases, it’s not present here: this is about as by-the-book as shoegaze gets. The effects-laden guitars are almost punishingly loud, drowning out even the drums that pound loudly beneath them. Even the acoustic-driven “Two Souls” is accompanied by a distant electric guitar that swells from gentle, clean arpeggios to shrieking tremolo lines as the song goes on.

While it might not approach anything as scorching as Sunbather, there are plenty of moments that are closer to heavy metal than standard-bearers of the genre. While most shoegaze has a distinctively dreamy quality to it, Apart is more mournful, like waking from that dream. From the opening machine gun riffs of “Apart” to the dark chord progression on “Heaven With You,” this EP is more aggressive and morose than most of their contemporaries.

One of the other things that sets Airs apart (heh) from the throngs of other bands in the shoegaze revival (again, nearly all of which I love) is the vocal delivery. Most shoegaze vocalists barely push their voices above a cough-syrupy moan, their vowels melting into the soundscape around them. But on Apart, the vocals are sung with passion. In another band, they might pass as emo, sometimes singing with enough gusto that they shoot past the intended note or crack as they open up their lungs to cry out. The vocals might be a point of contention for the average listener, but only if they misunderstand what it is Airs is doing—which is delivering a tense and cathartic bit of wall-of-noise that scratches the shoegaze itch without confining itself to the conventions of the genre.