If it’s hard to imagine, say, Joel Osteen enjoying Coffinworm’s “High on the Reek of Your Burning Remains” or Ophis’s “Necrotic Reflection,” it might be because there’s a sense of inevitability and inescapability to a good doom song. Lurking in the shadows of our culture’s towering prosperity gospels, doom offers a suffocating, dead-end corrective to saccharine rushes. The longer you listen, the deeper you go, the more you hear your options being eliminated. No soaring melody is coming to airlift you to safety, no witty couplet will lighten the mood. To press play is to submit. Don’t get up from your sofa. The sun’s going down. The future is hopeless. We’re on the brink of collapse. The country doctor is on the loose. You are doomed.

Or maybe not. In the midst of this sonic dismay, Pallbearer works like contractors hired by Black Sabbath and HGTV to renovate doom’s underground bunker, by installing major-scale emergency exits and unexpected, lovely chord changes that function as skylights. (Who says you can’t be heavy while standing in the sun?) While some doom purists may resent the gentrification, Pallbearer’s facility with melody, song structure and heart-on-your-sleeve singing has kept it inching toward the edge of crossover success, which is a strange place for a doom band to be.

Categorizing Pallbearer as prog-rock makes its commercial situation slightly less novel, and is appropriate to its ambitious compositions. (As the critic Michael Nelson has noted, many of its songs manage to be catchy without having choruses.) But no matter where you file its records, Pallbearer still honors doom’s prime directive: Make it heavy. When I asked a friend who studied music theory to explain why certain moments on “Heartless” sounded so powerful, his answer included “DRAMA,” “churchy,” “gravy,” “LOW” and “sweet, thick feeling.”

The guitarists Devin Holt and Brett Campbell play in drop-A tuning, which means fifths and octaves ringing in low registers. Their fastest songs still feel burdened. Though the classic pop chords at the end of “An Offering of Grief” are uplifting, the fact that C, G, F and the gang are slowly crashing down at 64 b.p.m. means you’ll probably never hear them in a Toyota commercial, unless Toyota starts selling cement mixers. Like all those records I played at the wrong speed, Pallbearer’s leave space to soak in each chord, even if you can’t see to the bottom.