There are a lot of things we’ve come to expect from The Acacia Strain across their twenty-year-plus career. They’ve built their career creating brutal deathcore like they were writing a textbook on the subject, utilizing a triple-guitar lineup to make for a punishingly heavy assault. Seemingly unrelated, there are a number of bands that we have come to expect glacially paced, brooding sludge metal from.

Generally speaking, you would assume that the overlap between the two to be nil. But then last week, The Acacia Strain released Failure Will Follow, a three-track, thirty-eight-minute record filled with guest features, offering up the kind of plodding, doomy metal that you’d expect from Cult of Luna or Amenra, but certainly not The Acacia Strain.

Before I go any further, it’s worth noting that this is one of two albums that the group released last week. The other, Step Into the Light, goes through ten tracks in twenty-six minutes and is much more in line with their trademark sound. That might give the impression that Failure Will Follow is a bit of an afterthought—the result of goofing around in the studio while working on their real new album. And often, when a band strays this far from their usual arena, it can come off as cosplay.

But if there was anything playful or ironic about this release, they hide it incredibly well. These songs are played with all of the deliberate seriousness of their usual fare. It also falls pretty tightly in the sludge/post-metal subgenre without feeling like they’re aping existing formulas—which is another pitfall that artists fall into when they make this kind of shift.

I’ll admit I have a bias—I’m a much bigger fan of this sort of stretched-out heaviness than deathcore. One of the surest ways to get me interested in a band is to compare them to ISIS or Cult of Luna. And yeah, that means I’ve never given The Acacia Strain much attention. But that also means I have a pretty low tolerance for bands that attempt this sound and come up short. But Failure Will Follow starts strong and gets stronger.

This sort of metal requires a mastery of tension: a careful consideration of how long to drone a chord and when to finally burst into a crushing riff. Wait too late and it gets boring. Explode too early and it the pressure hasn’t built enough for the release to satisfy. And that’s not necessarily a muscle that gets exercised by the sort of aggressive assault that TAC usually practices. But every moment of atmosphere and melody is carefully placed against howling vocals and martial drum grooves. They deftly shift between sparse and dense moments, knowing exactly how long to linger to maximize that tension before releasing it.

It’s an impressive album, and it would be even if the artists behind it didn’t spend over twenty years playing music of an almost opposite energy. It’s certainly gotten me curious about how much of this has been hiding beneath their typical metalcore barrage (I expect not much, actually). One thing’s for sure though: I hope this isn’t a one-off.

Failure Will Follow is available now through Rise Records.

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