Mount Eerie is one of those bands that I’ve mostly known just by reputation. For years, I’ve heard the name of Phil Elverum’s project thrown around alongside acts like Bon Iver, The Antlers, Sun Kil Moon, and other songwriters offering emotional devastation to hushed instrumentation.

So when I heard Wind’s Poem playing over the speakers at Ignition Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Mount Eerie was pretty near the bottom of the list of names I expected to hear attached to the bursts of black metal noise I was hearing.

I bought it on the spot, and find more to love about this record every time I hear it.My initial pigeonholing of Mount Eerie as hushed, devastating music isn’t entirely off base. This is, after all, the artist responsible for A Crow Looked At Me (which I’ll admit I haven’t heard yet). And there’s plenty of what I expected here. Elverum’s voice is whisper quiet, barely projecting over an atmosphere of spacious pianos, atmospheric clean electric guitar, wafting synths, the occasional woodwind, and one sample of the Twin Peaks soundtrack.

But shortly before he began work on this record, Phil got really into black metal. He saw through the shrieking and blast beats and found an atmospheric texture ripe with dissonance—both musical and emotional. He added these textures into his sonic toolbox and set off to work.

On paper, it might seem like an odd—maybe even distasteful—pairing. And on a shallow listen, sure, it can feel like these harsh moments ruin what is an otherwise sonically subdued record. But when you look deeper, it’s entirely on theme. Lyrically, Wind’s Poem is a record about the cycle of destruction and rebirth found in nature—specifically as it relates to the wind. There are moments of warm breezes, chilling northern gales, and violent storms that can change the landscape of the mountains themselves. And to that end, the bombastic moments aren’t just palatable, but thematically necessary. Not only that, but the record is mixed in such a way that the harsh and gentle sounds have a marriage between them that sounds cohesive throughout the record—especially on more radical juxtapositions like the brittle “My Heart is Not at Peace” and the crushing “Hidden Stone.”

What makes this record so powerful though is that even in these moments of aural chaos, Elverum’s songwriting never changes. Tempos remain unhurried. Elverum’s vocals are perpetually subdued and buried in the mix (a choice meant to coax the listener into turning the record up so they can be properly enveloped by the sounds). The lyrics have a plainness to them that belies the unpredictable sonic weather patterns and their cyclical nature.

All that said, this is an album that must be experienced in a single, uninterrupted sitting. The songs stand fine on their own, of course, but there is so much gained by the context of the entire record that it feels like a cruel misrepresentation of Mount Eerie’s work to remove them from that context. Whether you’re a fan of heavy music or not, set aside an hour, pull up the lyrics, and let this album consume you.