If it accomplished nothing else, God, Get Me the F*** Out of Here proved that shoegaze and hip hop aren’t entirely without overlap. Cold Gawd plugged their reverb pedals into their fuzz boxes and played with the spirit of hip hop. Only two years later, the SoCal outfit is back with a record that turns that concept up to eleven.

But I’ll Drown on This Earth borrows more than just aesthetic and mood. The vocals are often run through the same sort of autotune as Rihanna or T-Pain. Grooves are beefier and boomier. The skits are even more pronounced. And all this while also becoming more experimental and ambient.

Regardless of the actual demographics of the shoegaze scene’s artists and fans, shoegaze has a reputation for being a pretty white genre. Its smeared wall of noise might even feel like the apex of white folks taking all of the rhythm out of black musicians’ songs. And with dweeby poster boys like Kevin Shields and Neil Halstead, there’s plenty of ammunition for that melanin-deficient reputation.

But it’s true across pop music history that nearly every innovative white artist was a black artist doing it earlier. Even in shoegaze, you can find pioneers like the largely-forgotten duo AR Kane (huge influences on Kevin Shields, btw) and Majesty Crush, who played support for nearly every shoegaze band that toured through Detroit in the early 90s.

So while the thought of an unapologetically black shoegaze band might seem like a novelty to some listeners, Cold Gawd doesn’t treat it like one. Even the more tongue-in-cheek hip-hop moments are delivered like there’s no reason for them to be out of place.

And even more than that, they don’t sound like a novelty act. Despite the obvious—and brief—gimmicks, none of the songs ever sound contrived or concept-heavy. It would be easy for Cold Gawd to dip into cliches, but this is a thoroughly authentic expression. Every word is dripping with desperate honesty, even if it’s drenched in autotune or delivered in a hardcore scream.

And regardless of whatever disparate genres they’re mixing, the instrumental work is consistently gorgeous. Quite a few moments sent me looking for pictures of their pedalboards so I might work out how they’re getting those sounds. Whatever the mechanism behind their sounds, the end result is as shimmering and iridescent a wall of noise anyone in shoegaze has ever produced. And if Cold Gawd is fluent in this sort of sonic construction, this won’t be the last record of theirs that I preorder without hearing a second of it.