Discovering music is too easy these days.

I remember being a blossoming music fan at the turn of the millennium, surviving off of the scraps of burned CDs from friends’ older brothers, scouring message boards for the scent of morsels buried deep beneath the underground, trudging through tectonic-slow download speeds hoping that the files I’m downloading weren’t mislabeled. Maybe if I was lucky, the hours of time I put into that single song would be good enough to bid me to get my parents to drive me to the CD store and hope that they actually had it so I could fork over as much as twenty-four bucks in the hopes that more than just that one song was good.

Compare that to the process by which I discovered Flaw by Iress. I loaded up Bandcamp, went to the “Doomgaze” tag, and clicked on the first album I didn’t already know.

It was this one, and it was glorious: a chimera of dark synths, molten guitars, plodding drums, and soulful vocals that sounded like someone accidentally hired Cult of Luna as My Brightest Diamond’s backing band, but it was too late to reschedule the studio time, so they just went for it.

Luckily, it totally works.

I’ll admit, it’s not a completely novel approach—comparisons to Emma Ruth Rundle, Chelsea Wolfe, and BIG | BRAVE are immediate, obvious, and fair—and if you have followed this blog for any length of time, you already know that that is my jam.

If she were only accompanied by an acoustic guitar or piano, Michelle Malley’s voice, often buoyed by layers of her own harmonization, could easily find her a spot on a Starbucks sampler (does Starbucks still sell CDs?). Many of these songs could feel full enough with a stripped arrangement as well. But the addition of detuned guitars through dimed amps and a rhythm section that drives the song like they’re pulling a mountain behind them brings an emotional and sonic depth that I don’t want to hear these songs without.

“Shame” opens the record with a pulsing synth that persists beneath crushing distortion and a martial drumbeat that sounds like they’re leading a charge out of Valhalla. “Nest” seems to give a reprieve from the bombast, Malley singing a lament over a clean guitar. But once the song reaches the chorus, all semblance of restraint is shot to hell. “Underneath” moves into a major key, but without sacrificing an ounce of the heaviness of the earlier tracks. “Shallow” is one of the most arresting tracks on the record, slowly burning throughout its seven-minute runtime, Malley’s voice cracking through wordless cries until it becomes indistinguishable from the feedbacking guitar.

However, the most impressive and moving moment on the disk comes at the end of “Wolves,” where Malley is possessed by the passion that infected the most passionate of the blues singers, her smoky alto catching fire and burning down all around her. It’s an awe-inspiring moment that induces both fear and love, not unlike Shara Worden’s guest role as the Fairy Queen on the Decemberists’ Hazards of Love—which is a moment I’ve been chasing ever since I first heard that album.

“Hand Tremor” ends the record with a long pensive glance at the scorched wasteland Iress left in their path. And after the intensity of the seven tracks before it, it’s a needed breather for the listener as well. It caps the album like an epilogue, panning across the world after the apocalypse with a strange sort of relief that though everything you knew is gone, a lot of that was worth losing. And now, a chance to rebuild.