I usually try to be pretty discerning with my record purchases. My wantlist always exceeds my budget, so I try to make sure that I’m completely sold on what I’m buying.

But every once in a while, I’ll come upon something like a $10 vinyl sale and just become a madman. I’ll spend an hour or more frantically scrolling, streaming the first few minutes of a record for a sample before making a gut decision.

And thus is how I ended up with Lines Breaking Circles, the debut record from As We Draw, a killer blend of screamo, black metal, hardcore, and sludge.

While I grabbed this record from a Deathwish Inc. sale, the record was released through the French imprint Throat Ruiner Records, and boy, does this band fit the bill. Vocals are persistently ragged, even on the rare melodic passages. The tags on Bandcamp make up a list of subgenres well reputed for their aggressive screaming styles: black metal, sludge, crust punk, hardcore…

But while there are certainly large swaths of those colors, their sound is much harder to pin down into one niche. I’ve landed on putting “screamo” in the genre column on my spreadsheet, but it varies much further in tempo, dynamics, and mood than any single descriptor could capture. Oddly, even though it’s the top choice on all of their own descriptions, “black metal” is probably the worst. “Hardcore” might be the closest to their center, but they swing wildly out even from that. There are moments of chaotic math rock, ISIS-y post metal, straightforward skramz, and even some desert-tinged stoner rock. A “For fans of” section might include as varied names as Kowloon Walled City, Hot Water Music, Cult of Luna, Aussitôt Mort, Mayhem, Glassing, or Bane.

Remarkably though, the record never sounds like its having a hard time finding its voice. The struggle is on the side of the one doing the taxonomy. The band themselves are self-assured and impressive. There isn’t a single moment on the record that feels out of place or derivative or scattered. As We Draw is fluent in their own vocabulary of heaviness and emotional weight, and lucky for us, we don’t have to know the grammar to be able to enjoy it.