In the twenty-five years since the release of You’d Prefer an Astronaut, the musical landscape has been filled with bands that exist at the altar of HUM. The combination of doom metal heaviness, laid back vocal delivery, and major key melodies that HUM delivered on that breakthrough has inspired everyone from Deftones to Cave In to Quicksand to Cloakroom to Spotlights to The Life & Times to True Widow…I could go on.

But now, two decades after going on hiatus, HUM has released a new record that proves that they’re still the kings of space rock. And it might just be their best ever.

As much as I loved You’d Prefer an Astronaut, that album has a few detours of 90s slacker rock that diminish its power for me. That’s why I have always preferred their 1998 release, Downward is Heavenward, which ignored their more college radio tendencies in favor of big riffs and anthemic tempos.

But Inlet takes that preference for power and turns it up to twelve. Every song is played at amp-splitting volumes with the drums pounding like he’s trying to break the cymbals. “Waves” opens the record with bursting walls of noise that serve as a reminder of their indelible legacy. “Desert Rambler” may be the heaviest thing they’ve ever done, and it’s not even uniquely heavy for this album. “The Summoning” could be a straightforward doom metal track if it was sung by anyone besides Matt Talbot, whose lackadaisical voice hardly seems to notice the sonic maelstrom around him.

There are a few moments of reprieve, but they’re spent exploring how to best turn a guitar into a pure texture, running their instruments through as many effects pedals as they can until it becomes unrecognizable (best executed on the closing section of “Folding“). “Shapeshifter“ends the album with a similarly dreamy moment, clean, meditative guitars underpinning one of Talbot’s most immediately satisfying melodies.

Albums like this one really point out the insufficiencies of words to describe music. Because I could spend paragraphs talking about how purely loud and dreamy and heavy and melodic this record is, in extreme degrees and in equal measure, but the music itself transcends any sort of attempt to describe it. It’s a simple formula—and it’s not even that unique. And how can I put into words the magic that happens when these four individuals grab their instruments? It is infinitely larger than the sum of its parts. While HUM is well known for creating this sort of heavy, dreamy rock and roll, this is by far the heaviest and dreamiest thing they have ever done.

And yes, the writer in my is berating me for using both “heavy” and “dreamy” far too many times in this review, but I don’t care. This is the Platonic Ideal of what Hum—and all of their acolytes—are trying to do.