Full of Hell burst forth with incredible force from the small, dagger-shaped city of Ocean City, Maryland, 15 years ago. Over five full-lengths, five collaborative full-lengths, and countless splits, EPs, singles, and noise compilations, they’ve evolved at extraordinary speed, their music becoming more complicated and technical without ever slowing down or losing its soul. Everything on a Full of Hell album feels like a blur: smears of guitar, harsh noise shaken like gravel in a bag, singer Dylan Walker’s snarl and bite carrying him into outer space or into the core of the earth. They’re coiled, interlocking, impossible to penetrate, and they move with alarming speed. 

From beyond the Spire and the Ward of Song echoes Cloakroom’s tertiary LP, Dissolution Wave.

It’s like this: The concept of Cloakroom’s third album is a space western in which an act of theoretical physics—the dissolution wave—wipes out all of humanity’s existing art and abstract thought. In order to keep the world spinning on its axis, songsmiths must fill the ether with their compositions. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Spire and Ward of Song act as a filter for human imagination: Only the best material can pass through the filter and keep the world turning.

This is the philosophical universe that Cloakroom guitarist/vocalist Doyle Martin conceived as a way of processing the last few years. “We lost a couple of close friends over the course of writing this record,” he says. “Dreaming up another world felt easier to digest than the real nitty-gritty we’re immersed in every day.”

With lyrics based on an imagined cosmology, Dissolution Wave also marks a grand expansion of Cloakroom’s dreamy space-rock palette. “We often get lumped in with stoner rock bands—and I love that,” bassist Bobby Markos offers, “but at the same time, we can do an acoustic set. If we wanted to make a song completely out of synthesizers, we could. So our approach to Dissolution Wave was to do everything we’ve ever wanted to do.”