As difficult as music taxonomy is on its own, metal brings its own challenges. The delineations between the different subgenres get so microscopic that it feels pointless.

For years, I struggled to figure out where exactly sludge metal fits. Many of the bands typically labeled sludge felt more like post metal to me. Others were undeniably doom.

But this record is undeniably sludge: it is thick and heavy, oozing out of the turntable for eighty minutes.

Cult of Luna are no strangers in the sludge metal/post metal arena. In any conversation about post metal, the Swedish metallurgists are named alongside ISIS and Neurosis as the pianoeers and Platonic ideal of the genre. And like the other two groups, Cult of Luna has made a long career out of playing churning, slow heavy metal that makes liberal use of hypnotic composition, atmospheric passages, and long running times.

While I’ve been in love with their seminal 2004 album Salvation for years, none of the other CoL records I’ve listened to have sounded quite as essential. However, on their eighth full length, they create something as clear-eyed and focused as ever.

A Dawn To Fear runs through eight songs in an hour and and twenty minutes, but despite such a hefty running time, not a second is wasted. Every held out chord, every repeated chord progression, every ringing minute of feedback is entirely deliberate and wholly effective. This record is a masterwork in tension building and release. Certain songs last several minutes between any sort of catharsis, and when it finally comes, it’s like a waterfall.

The record opens with “The Silent Man,” a fiery bit of riffage that bursts out the gate with heavily distorted guitars, overdriven bass, and a driving snare beat. A slide guitar played through a fuzz pedal burns through the chords and screamed vocals like a fissure of magma. “Lay Your Head to Rest” brings down the tempo but increases the menace. For a while, the band churns on a single chord, breaking into a slowly syncopated groove once every several repeats. When that groove finally repeats itself more than once towards the end of the song, it feels like the roof has been blown off.

“A Dawn to Fear” pulls back almost entirely, but it is no more peaceful. Ambient organs and eerie group vocals drift through the atmosphere, threatening coming violence. The drums finally start playing a beat four minutes into the song, joined by slide guitar and gritty bass until exploding into a thick riff at the 5:30 mark. “Nightwalkers” is centered around a chromatic guitar line that wouldn’t be out of place heralding a creepy carnival.

The fifteen minute “Lights on the Hill” traffics in extremes, offering both the album’s sparsest and heaviest moments. “We Feel The End” is the most restrained song on the record, pairing Ebowed guitars and minimalist electric piano with a clean vocal line drenched in effects. Though the drums’ entrance five minutes into the song might hint at coming explosion, it never comes. Instead, it keeps swelling through “Inland Rain,” which doesn’t burst until four minutes in.

“The Fall” closes the record with a microcosm of the album condensed down to thirteen minutes. It returns to the crushing, grooving riffs of the early tracks, pausing in the middle for a few minutes of instrumental introspection before creating the albums thickest wall of noise.

Admittedly, it’s eighty minute runtime doesn’t exactly make it an easy listen—especially with the imposing, lurching density of the songs. But as far as lurching, dark sludge metal is concerned, this is absolute top shelf. A Dawn to Fear doesn’t just live up to Cult of Luna’s already legendary reputation: it might just be the best album they’ve ever released.

And, the vinyl packaging is excellent. The band’s name is sparsely embossed on the jacket, the record is pressed in the same colors as the art, and the lyric sheet contains several pages of monochromatic photography that drives the mood of the record even further.