Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is not happy with our conversation. On an overcast January day in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, where the snow is piled in mountains of stained white and the sidewalks are caked in rutted slicks of ice, we sit on a couch in his unadorned apartment for an hour and a half, mostly talking about his personal history.

We speak about his childhood, which was split between New York, New Jersey, and New Mexico. We discuss his parents, who attended seminary before becoming renowned marriage counselors and best-selling self-help authors. And we explore how his band, Liturgy, went from a depressive, Ivy League dorm-room solo project, to the lightning rod of the heavy metal community, to a group that broke up after two albums only to reappear with this month’s confrontational, confounding The Ark Work.

He has been generally forthcoming, too. He tells me that it was painful to be called “faggot,” “hipster faggot,” “hipster scum,” and “scum” because of the music he made. He was sad when Greg Fox—Liturgy’s drummer and one of Hunt-Hendrix’s best friends since middle school—bailed on the group soon after the release of their 2011 breakthrough, Aesthethica. But after an hour, his voice starts to soften mid-sentence, as if he’s revealed too much. He then springs from the couch and paces near the entrance to his kitchen.

“That got kind of like ‘Behind the Music’, didn’t it?” he says. He glances up furtively, his pronounced, arching eyebrows pointing like arrows toward his ears. His left hand fidgets near the corner of his mouth. He pulls a sheet of paper from the refrigerator, strides across the room, and yanks another from above his stereo: “This is the stuff that I really like to talk about,” he pronounces, delivering both to me.

The pages contain dual diagrams that are also included in The Ark Work’s liner notes. The first is an elongated pentagon populated by rays and lines, arches and pyramids. The topmost side of the shield blares “Sovereign Hierarchico-Emancipatory Individuation Municipality” in all capital letters. The second diagram surrounds a shape that suggests the directional pad of a Super Nintendo controller with a triangle made of arrows—philosophy feeds into art, which feeds into music, which feeds back into philosophy, ad infinitum. I tell him to text me the images so we can talk about them the following day.

He says OK and smiles.