If you’ve been following my posts at all, you know that I have a fatal weakness for music that marries the heavy with the beautiful. I am powerless to resist just about any album that uses crushing volumes alongside gorgeous melodies and lush atmospheres (it’s kind of a problem, financially speaking).

Even though my record shelves are already stuffed full with such records, I am constantly on the hunt for more. Recently, I was trudging through Spotify’s “Fans Also Like” of bands I already love, and on Holy Fawn’s page, I discovered Grivo, a heavy shoegaze trio from Austin. I was instantly smitten, and when I went to show a friend who I knew would love it, I noticed that he had already sent it to me a few weeks prior.

But where Omit outshines so many albums with a similar ethos is in their glistening ambience, which is reminiscent more of dream pop bands like Cocteau Twins.

From the doomgaze churn of opener “Trammel,” I was hooked. But the relative straightforwardness of that track didn’t prepare me for the hypnotic swirl of the title track after it. While plenty of heavy lush bands cite Cocteau Twins as an influence (see: Deftones), it’s not really something you’d be able to pick up just by hearing it. But the guitars on this album actually sound like they’ve been ripped right out of Heaven or Las Vegas, awash with reverse reverbs and modulations as they are.

But if it were just whooshy guitars and dreamy vocals, it wouldn’t capture me nearly as much as it does. Because those atmospheres often reach an explosive pressure, erupting with doomy walls of noise. “Fatigue” is particularly violent, switching between atmospheric verses and explosive choruses without warning. But those fiery passages are still just as ambrosial as the softer moments, such as in the closing track “There,” which finds the bass turning on the fuzz pedals and the drums crashing on the cymbals while the guitar still floats ethereally in clean tones. A few moments are more reliant on the countermelodies of minimalist riffs between the guitar and bass, not unlike Pedro the Lion, such as the almost bluesy “Languor.”

While the guitars get most of the attention in music like this, the drums on this album are sublime as well. It’s often hard for a drummer to be engaging at the sort of sludgy tempos that dominate the genre, but they play as a perfect accompaniment here. The drums are solid throughout the record, but the angular groove in the verses of “Attuned” might steal the show for a bit.

The second part of my bad record buying habits is that I often purchase something, listen to it once, and then ignore it for years. However, in the few weeks that I’ve had this record, I’ve found myself reaching for it far more often than most new purchases. And I have a feeling that that’s only going to continue. If this doesn’t end up on my year-end list, it might be same to assume that I’m being held hostage.