Together, Bell Witch's Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shreibman and Erik Moggridge of Aerial Ruin breathe a vast, slow-burning fire. Doom's gravity is harrowed toward something spectrally devotional, a reverence dragged across the threshold of death's hush, ever deeper into desolation. This alignment of heavy ritual and mournful folk summons forth aurals neither one nor t'other, as sickly luminous in its radiance as an abyssal dredge.

Out on Profound Lore, the cyclopean movements of their new album Stygian Bough: Volume II deepens the alchemy between the two in a slow awakening of faith under duress. Circling a desolate sun of worship and consequence, the form is cyclical, ascending and folding back into itself while being reshaped by the shadow of what it has already consumed. The latticework of the rational is unwoven by the superstitious, the hum of creation shuddering to bear the quiet violence of collapsing belief. Within this recursion melody holds its court as a binder of disparate selves into a singular organism on the edge of erasure.

• Stygian Bough Volume I, by BELL WITCH and AERIAL RUIN

• Stygian Bough Volume I, by BELL WITCH and AERIAL RUIN