From HeadBangersBlog.com, Like Tool, Neurosis and Pelican, Boston-bred post-metal band Isis creates sprawling, droning metal that’s both brutal in impact and transcendent in delivery. Whether performed with screamed or softly sung vocals, dense or spacious guitars, storming beats or featherlight cymbal strokes, the songs spiral, twist and dive in both narrative and instrumental story arcs, unraveling like epic poems or multi-layered film soundtracks.

Isis songs aren’t constructed with traditional verses or choruses and they’re not willfully oblique, instead blossoming like computer fractals into something beautiful and mysterious. Only, they’re not randomly generated — not at all. Each swelling crescendo, every billowing cluster of tones is carefully examined, analyzed and assembled to be as emotional and revelatory as possible. Sometimes they tumble in jagged, rhythmically complex shards, other times they drift in sparse, simple waves, yet however they reveal themselves, they do so with purpose and passion. (Click “more” to hear our podcast interview with Isis frontman Aaron Turner.)

Isis’ seventh album since 1999, Wavering Radiant (our May 5), is paradoxically unsettling and embracing. The songs are some of the band’s most progressive and structurally demanding to date, yet they’re easy to slip inside and become lost in. And unlike 2006’s In The Absence of Truth which sometimes seemed overly studied, the new batch of tunes — although crafted over a longer, more work-intensive period of time — somehow sounds freer and more spontaneous.

HeadbangersBlog.com recently hooked up with frontman Aaron Turner to talk about the creation of Wavering Radiant, why he won’t discuss his lyrics, recent challenges and obstacles in his life and the influence of drugs — or lack thereof — on good psychedelia. Turner also addressed his kinship with Tool and Neurosis, his experimental music label Hydra Head and the benefits and drawbacks of music filesharing.

HBBPodcastIsis.mp3 - Isis

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