It’s easy to skip past coverage of bands that don’t seem to fit your vibe, so this may be the first that you’re reading about Lord Mantis and their third album, Death Mask. But hear us now: Lord Mantis is Earth’s most newsworthy metal band. For one thing, Death Mask appears on like six lists of 2014’s best albums — here on MetalSucks alone — and represents the clearest example of forward movement in loud music. But also it’s this year’s purest statement of metal’s purpose: to acquaint its listeners with the extremes of an individual’s potential for a lot of really complicated pain. This takes place in our physical world — not the spirit world, nor the one that resides in each human’s mind. Look around you.

Via Death Mask, Lord Mantis asks, Can any dark mysticism, any malignant supernatural power, any act of any god or devil be more terrible than the damning abuses that humans perpetrate on humans? It warns a listener that a belief system, a faith, a spirituality of any kind is not more powerful than a rapist with a gun. It creates an experience like 24 hours of side-by-side screens showing Bad Lieutenant and Irreversible at half speed.

So it follows that Death Mask‘s first video, “Possession Prayer,” is seven minutes of despair (above, via Bloody Disgusting). The album’s most shapeless jam, “Prayer” supplies a perfect soundtrack for a symbolism-packed clip, for to pair it to a literal interpretation of its pulsing doom chants would be redundant. So it joins Tool’s “Prison Sex” (and every other Tool video) in the category of music videos that make a viewer go wash their hands right way. Very NSFW for dicks, vag, blood, and entrails.

Lord Mantis’ Death Mask is out now via Profound Lore.