����� Although this French band has yet to get much attention over here in the US, their second album Natron was one of my more eagerly anticipated new albums this past fall, the follow-up to what I thought was one of the most intense industrial metal albums in recent memory. I absolutely loved that Psychurgy debut, couldn't stop playing it for weeks after I picked it up. Their sound was unmistakably influenced by classic Godflesh, harnessing that kind of titanic, grinding riffage and industrialized, drum machine-driven churn but fusing it to swirling melodic drift and traces of trance-inducing psychedelia. You don't hear many newer bands doing anything innovative with industrial metal, but these guys nailed a killer, distinctive sound on that album.

����� With the follow-up Natron, they've generated something even less classifiable, less beholden to industrial metal tropes. The stark industrial soundscapes and cold electronic rhythms heard previously are all present, producing that dystopian atmosphere that serves as a backdrop for Crown's punishing down-tuned riffs. And like before, the reverberations of classic power-dirge a la Godflesh and Neurosis are there in the band's brand of pulverizing, mechanized heaviness. But those influences are just one aspect, joined by a heavy dose of blackened aggression. When this erupts into the mournful, blastbeat-driven fury of "Wings Beating Over Heaven "; the beginning of the song has a strong black metal influenced feel, but it quickly mutates into a sprawl of smoldering electronica. That distinguishes Natron from the debut, the songs shifting between grueling deathtech dirges and frenzied industrial black metal assaults, but then they'll also suddenly slip into something like the icily infectious post-punk of "Fossils", a dark piece of driving, majestic gloom-pop that sort of resembles a more pneumatically driven Beastmilk; and on "Apnea", they weave more of that morose post-punk around one of their signature earthmoving riffs, welding that machinelike, slow-motion ultra-crush to a terrific downcast hook, with soaring emotional singing giving this industrialized violence a shot of heart-wrenching human emotion.

����� So goddamn good. "Apnea" is the best thing I've heard from these guys yet, intense and catchy, but the rest of this album is pretty killer as well. The other songs serve up powerful blasts of heavily processed, massively distorted guitars grinding beneath more of hauntingly moody melodies, driving Joy Divisionesque bass guitar and the frenzied vocals fighting their way out of that pulverizing heaviness. The heavily textured production is fantastic, giving lots of depth and dynamics to these crushing mecha-metal anthems, entering a level of sound design that at times almost reminds me of some of Trent Reznor's work. It's definitely a lot more nuanced than your typical Godflesh worship, and this album shows the band transcending their influences for the most part, creating something much more complex and immersive than even their debut. It's the best industrial metal album on this list, if you dug their debut as much as I did, you'll love what they've turned into with Natron.