For all of the variety within metal and its various subgenres, perhaps no two camps are further apart than doom and thrash. Doom metal is slow and plodding, its tempo held back by the immense mass of its heaviness. Thrash, on the other hand, is brutally fast, like a motorcycle strapped with machine guns.

And at the center of this dichotomy is Matt Pike. After rising to prominence in the legendary stoner doom band Sleep, he formed the thrash project High on Fire. And while there’s still plenty of stoner metal crossover here, the tempo is a good eight times faster than anything Sleep ever did. Snakes for the Divine is a riffy, smokey record that stands up to even the thrashiest of thrash classics.

I’m actually not sure if thrash gets any better than the riff that opens the title track. A double-picked pull-off melody sounds out like a military horn, and the rest of the band answers like a cavalry at full speed. After eight minutes of onslaught, it’s easy to expect that nothing can live in that song’s mighty shadow.

But the record races on like it didn’t just drop an all-timer riff. Double-time drums and chugging bass rip underneath Pike’s monstrous growl and palm-muted buzzsaw guitar. There are a few slowdowns that feel more Sabbath than Metallica-ballad, but they don’t offer much quarter. Instead, these slower moments feel like retreats to the corner between rounds of a boxing match while your unsweating opponent stares with a menacing in the opposite corner waiting for the bell to start the next beatdown.

For all the punch it packs though, High on Fire don’t seem to be taking themselves too seriously. The lyrics largely center around the belief that Adam had a reptilian wife before Eve named Lillith, and that their children were transdimensional shapeshifters that formed ancient Mesopotamia, but they seem mostly tongue in cheek. Even the music feels like they’re just having a blast. And in a genre that is very often too self serious, Snakes for the Divine is great bit of levity that is still heavy as hell.