Sometimes, you just need some music that will crush you. Times like when you’ve been fighting a weird illness and are sitting at home in a fog of post-blood-draw fatigue as you wait to hear the results of your bloodwork. That’s a highly specific mood, and it’s hardly the only feeling that calls for demolitions-grade heavy music.

But whatever causes that mood to strikes, LLNN is just what the doctor ordered. Unmaker, the third album from the Copenhagen quartet, is a gut-wrenching bit of dark, sludgy metal so hefty that it should come with a lift warning.

I first heard of LLNN while trying to scratch the itch for more Glassing, which is an extraordinarily difficult craving to satisfy. I found LLNN in their “Fans Also Like” section on Spotify, and was immediately enraptured.

As a larger class, metal suffers from an obsessive minutia of taxonomy. Subgenres are classified and dissected into microgenres, and lines that you would think would be blurry are in fact rigid fences that are razor thin and sky high. Try showing a black metal band to a blackened death metal fan, or try to suss out the difference between post-black metal and blackgaze. Apparently, even metalcore and metallic hardcore are different things?

LLNN (like Glassing) has no interest in these divisions though. They take their heaviness wherever they can get it. There are moments of black metal’s occult atmosphere, hardcore’s relentless passion, death metal’s dark precision, metalcore’s abrasive dissonance, and sludge metal’s ominous plodding. The vocals similarly jump between abrasive screamo wails, death metal growls, and occasionally the near-bark of hardcore.

What really sets LLNN apart though is their synth player, who lays droning, horror-movie inspired atmospheres beneath even the loudest moments. Take “Obsidian” for instance. It emerges from a dark, foreboding cloud of synth pads and metallic samples into a punishing bit of atonal riffage. This sort of intro isn’t rare in metal, but typically when the song “starts,” the soundscape is destroyed by the more traditional metal sonic palette. But on “Obsidian,” the atmosphere is an equal partner, offering a subdued sonic counterpoint to the instrumental fury happening around it—not that the calmer sections are any less unsettling than the rest.

This balance is what makes Unmaker so remarkable in a musical landscape oversaturated with heavy bands. They understand that heaviness isn’t entirely a matter of volume. Quietness can be heavy too if it’s tense enough, and this is a record built on tension. It refuses to be still, even when it quiets down. And that is, in a word, crushing.