This is how mewithoutYou’s 2015 album, Pale Horses, ends: In its closing seconds, frontman Aaron Weiss narrates a dream in which he becomes his own father; in the background, a series of guitar notes brighten and blur as if melting away in the fallout of a nuclear blast. The sky splits open. Protons collide in the empty air. Buildings burst apart and scatter weightless as dandelion seeds. Stars loosen from the sky like figs from a branch. Everything gets paved over with emptiness, the earth shaved down to a lifeless irradiated desert.

What happens then, after the end of the world sweeps through? The seventh album from the Philadelphia post-hardcore band, called [Untitled], seems to take place amid this scraped-out post-apocalyptic nothingness; its scale is wide, its landscape sprawls. Weiss opens the album as if waking from the dream that ended Pale Horses; chords gather and swell and he screams a date and time of uncertain significance—“9:27 a.m. / 7/29!”—his voice howling across a scorched earth. Weiss’ imagery—the glow of phosphorous, ploughshares morphing back into swords—draws alternately from scripture, from the history of international warfare, and from his own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of meanings and associations, like sections of a newspaper spilling onto the floor as you read it.

The scene the rest of the band paints behind him is, in a way, just rock music, gnarled and swelling post-hardcore bruises inherited from bands like Sunny Day Real Estate. But it’s rock driven to the furthest edges of its own potential dreaminess and austerity. On “Julia (or, ‘Holy to the LORD’ on the Bells of Horses),” guitars bloom in hazy roses, as if glimpsed through a window cloudy with fingerprints; Weiss, instead of screaming or singing, barely whispers over this, a bird perched on a power line singing into the hum. He paraphrases Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of right and wrong is a field/Will you meet me there?”) under his breath and adapts imagery from 1984 (“‘Send a couple rats,’ said Julia/I’d have done the same thing to you”) to convey the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that boil beneath the surface of even the deepest, most telepathic relationships. When Weiss sings, “Who do you think needs who more?” it’s chilling—he’s peering fearlessly into the gap that gradually widens between ourselves and others.

Listening to Weiss’ almost overcrowded songs can feel like sifting through the static between two banded radio stations, as on “[dormouse sighs],” where voices and images from seemingly distinct sources overlap and disappear back into a low menacing thrum. There’s rarely one sure meaning to a mewithoutYou song; instead, you come away with a hundred little interlacings. On the centerpiece of the record, “Flee, Thou Matadors!,” Weiss plays the characters of both the fictional, mad Ferdinand VIII, King of Spain, and the historical, mad Maria I, Queen of Portugal. The song withers into silence towards its end before a guitar solo unfurls from its center, guitarists Michael Weiss and Brandon Beaver bending the remainder of the song into a question mark, unresolved, flickering between states—quiet to loud, composed to disintegrated ribbons of tape. It’s a microcosm of [Untitled] as a whole, a byzantine, feverish album that unravels and pieces itself back together song by song, a mind gradually turning inward on itself.

Both [Untitled] and its accompanying EP from August, also [untitled], find Weiss watching the wave of mental illness that overtook his father advancing toward him; “Dad tried his best/But finally fell apart at just my age,” he sings on the EP’s “Existential Dread, Six Hours’ Time.” Here, he zooms in on the rot he believes is inching through his skull. “Have I established a pattern perhaps/A biannual mental collapse?” he asks the closer, “Break on Through (to the Other Side) [Pt. Two],” the music of which explores the dreaminess of the other side as much as the Doors song depicted the breakthrough. Weiss later dreams of writing a sequel to the Belle and Sebastian song, “The State I Am In” in “New Wine, New Skins” and succeeds somewhat—both songs sustain a kind of slow, melancholy sway, at least before “New Wine” starts to stutter and lurch violently: “Come, unfastening android limbs/In the moonlight through translucent skin,” Weiss sings as the guitars stretch and shiver back into shape like elastic. “Now we’ve both been there and back again/to the state that I’m no longer in.” It’s as if he took the original Belle and Sebastian song and pulled it inside out until it was as bottomless and uncertain as his own thoughts.

As Weiss attempts to document his potential unraveling, the album’s language gets knottier and knottier. “Have I made myself?/And myself clear?” he shouts on “Another Head for Hydra,” as lost in what he acknowledges are imaginary constructions of the self as he is in their continuous fallings apart. His writing is dense, but the density is the point of the project; he is trying to convey the totality of not knowing. Like the exploding ropes of color on the album cover, the picture [Untitled] forms doesn’t necessarily get any clearer the more one stares at it; it’s a huge unhinged massing confusion of everything—the Old Testament, the French Revolution, lyrics from a Beatles song that stick in the mind like footage in an old projector. There’s no individual story that it can be reduced to; it’s all congealed together, so that by the end of the record there’s no thread to hold onto and no sound left except what any survivor can tell you comes after the apocalypse: the empty howl of mental illness. “Someday/I’ll find me,” Weiss sings almost mournfully on “Break on Through,” but the tremble of his voice seems to acknowledge there could just as well be nothing on the other side.