- Chicago trio Locrian have been slaving in obscurity for years now. A prolific unit, spinning out dozens of cassettes wound with long droning sounds that - like a fishing line stuck on something unseen, deep, dark and unspeakable - were linked to some occasionally, terrifyingly heavy sounds. Moving past cassettes and 7”s the band have been no less energetic, managing three full-lengths since 2009. All that work was noticed by Relapse, signing them last year and now releasing their label debut, Return To Annihilation.

Always keen to mix up their styles, Locrian have gone further afield than ever before, as is advertised - very clearly - on opener Eternal Return. Groaning synthesiser sounds have some people reaching for John Carpenter references: has he become the go-to guy for grim synth sounds?

Seconds later, the synth is lifted aloft by an explosion of guitar texture, a delicious sweetener for this brand new shoegaze sound. Equally quickly Locrian dispense any pretension to being The Cocteau Twins or even The Jesus And Mary Chain, slamming the listener with shrieking vocals, that, wailing over the top of the synth, are more akin to Prurient’s maleficent back-catalogue.

Yeah, Locrian are a black-metal band; I knew you’d find out sooner or later. They are, however, many other things besides, many of them very listenable, a quality which the band seem keen to emphasise here. Stumbling over this record in the immediate aftermath of Deafheaven’s rise to black-metal to post-rock, cross-over fame seemed too providential to ignore, especially since (with many a black-metal maven proclaiming Deafheaven as the church-burners you can take home to mum) Return To Annihilation is even more accessible DH's vaunted album Sunbather.

This is, er, not well demonstrated by the album’s second cut, A Visitation From The Wrath Of Heaven, which features Locrian doing what they know: six-and-a-half minutes of drone before the cleansing, fiery end that the title promises, vaporises everything in a minute-and-a-half.

Two Moons goes steady with some Sun O))) style drone-n-doom that is not as viscerally exciting as the masters of the sound, but Locrian have clearly been saving themselves for the album’s title track, which hints at where it’s going with ominous sounding chants over a propulsive rhythm guitar. They let the noise billow outward in a wave of amorphous guitar fuzz and bring the beat crashing back into a cathedral ambience, an epic texture through which floats both fearsome screams and a sweet guitar melody. It's a great post-rock hybrid, and one I’m counting on to get you in, but as anyone who’s listened to the record will tell you, closer Obsolete Elegies is fifteen minutes you must listen to: tortured guitar strings and a nasty synth buzz are the crawling overture heralding a soulful duet between guitar and synthesiser that itself subsides into quiet ambience, with steely, droning strings, that decay into a chittering horror, reminiscent of Ligeti. The band find one last reserve of scarring fire, fullfilling their mission in an apotheosis of stoner, post-rock and black metal.

Return To Annihilation, certainly does bring the destruction, but, on this expansive record, it does a lot more besides. Locrian must be searching for a wider audience and in their careful subsumation of a variety of styles, they’ll certainly find that; just how wide, is up to you.

- Chris Cobcroft.