Raze the neon towers and huddled tenements of futuristic cityscapes – from Blade Runner to The Dark Knight Rises – and you’ll find Metropolis as their foundation. Released as a silent film in 1927, it’s echoed through our collective sci-fi imagination ever since. C3PO, the Macintosh 1984 commercial, the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, the artificial hands of various James Bond villains, the sunken city of Rapture in BioShock – all have come, in some way, from that clockwork dystopia or its tortured denizens. Yet aside from Giorgio Moroder and Freddie Mercury‘s re-imagining of the score in 1984, there haven’t been many sonic interpretations of the film. (And no, that Dream Theater song on Images and Words doesn’t have much relation beyond the title.)

Enter Sweden’s Cult of Luna, whose progressive post-metal/sludge sound is the ideal musical analog for the film’s harsh expressionist palette and its themes of oppression, revolt, catharsis and tragedy. The band’s heavy/light ebb and flow is rendered here with a bright, gleaming coldness that I haven’t heard from them since the alien drone of 2004’s Salvation. Previous album Eternal Kingdom had a rustic and weathered twang, but that’s now replaced by influences from early 80s synth/cinema like Vangelis, John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream. You’ll hear that frozen loveliness in “The One” and its reprise “The Sweep” – like rays of starlight on an apocalyptic horizon – or in the sci-fi warble that vibrates through the center of the lumbering “Synchronicity” and the bleak, dirge-like “Mute Departure.”

While these embellishments amplify Vertikal’s atmosphere of futuristic misery, it’s Cult of Luna’s well-honed sense of dynamics and flow that really make this a captivating and hypnotic journey. Tracks like “I: The Weapon” or my album favorite “In Awe Of” start as massive juggernauts, with echoing shouts like working-class chants manning a labyrinth of blastpits. Each then drifts into a complex jangle of tones and thrums that vibrate with eerily beautiful melody. Vertikal’s best moments sound like a first-person fly-through the heart of an epic mechanical technopolis. Down in its depths, every cog and every piston rumbles, twists and churns with ceaseless efficiency, kept oiled by the blood of its workers and lit by the glow of a thousand furnaces.

You won’t find easy thrills or quick catharsis here, yet it’s explosive and overwhelming all the same. 18-minute centerpiece “Vicarious Redemption” makes this abundantly clear – it takes its time luring you into a lulled and dreamlike state before it brings the sledgehammer down. The smart and elegant addition of those 80s synths and Blade Runner aesthetic was already a plus in my book, but I really love how Cult of Luna has eschewed the usual industrial bells and whistles in Vertikal. No hissing pistons or clanking metal, no mechanized vocals, no flittering blips and beeps. Instead, the band has taken their angular and singular approach to metal and crafted the loveliest of cacophonies, and like Metropolis’ haunting golden automatrix, it’s at once mechanical and organic.

Yes, it’s only January, but Vertikal is already an early favorite for my 2013 year-end list, and I think it’s also the band’s most complete and compelling album to date.

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