Make no mistake. Bruul by Bruul is a black metal EP.

Except it isn’t.

Except when it is.

Confused? You will be.

In spirit, it is a monstrous black metal EP that wallows in the musical evil of that genre like a pig in a mud bath, but musically it is a mix of genres so different that they shouldn’t work together, yet somehow do.

When I first got the EP sent to me, I glanced at the blurb that accompanied it and saw Black/Doom Metal, which instantly gave me pause. I have heard Black/Doom Metal before and welcome it about as much as I do a dose of clap.

Usually, bands that toil under that banner are a mixture of Cathedral drunkenly arm wrestling Mayhem to prove that they are more extreme than everyone else. Bruul, however, do not do that.

Boasting a Northern pedigree made up of members from Petrichor, Sathamel, Knim and Ante-Inferno, they embrace the doom metal side of their music, but not in the way you might expect. Instead, they use it as a vast canvas on which to paint their own Jackson Pollock mixture of black metal.

Their sound is vast, cavernous, and will fill every nook and cranny you have, but they will also do it by bludgeoning you with the sound they weave.

There is something going on in the world of Bruul that should make no sense at all to the listener, yet when you hear it, when you feel it invade you, it strikes with perfect clarity.

The pace is brutal and unforgiving and, at the same time, perfectly balanced.

In fact, the blast beats from drummer Joe Rees-Jones (who also recorded, mixed and mastered this whole beast) make up much of the backbone of the music, appearing frantic and slow within the same passage. It’s like watching a magic trick unfold in front of you and knowing that, even if the magician explained it, you still wouldn’t be able to figure out how he did it.

The same goes for the guitars from Andy Mawer and James Cross, alongside Nate Lewis’s bass. The are claustrophobic enough to give you a full-blown panic attack and, at the same time, open enough to make an agoraphobe cower at the sheer expanse of space they leave you facing.

Vocally, you will experience full-blown black metal screams, haunting almost-gothic passages, and a range so deep at times you will be convinced they dug to the centre of the Earth to find the source.

Across these five tracks, from the opening blast of Gates Of Silence, through Words Of The Sword, the crushing Symphony Of Misery, the cosmic void of A Dawnless Star, to the folk-infused ritual closure of Blessed Is The Flame, the sheer variety on display is staggering.

That’s the thing that keeps coming back to me with Bruul. It shouldn’t work. There are moments where the band seem to be pulling in completely different directions, throwing black metal, doom, folk, gothic atmosphere and whatever else they’ve got lying around into the same musical blender.

Somehow, they come out the other side with something that feels completely coherent.

I am utterly fascinated by this EP. It shouldn’t work. From the description I got, I should’ve hated this record.

But I don’t.

I love it.

Sometimes the best records are the ones that make absolutely no fucking sense until they suddenly, inexplicably, do.

Bruul by Bruul is out now.