A couple of weeks after publishing my Best Metal Albums of 2014 list, I looked back on it and realized how many smaller bands were included. And judging from reader responses, people wanted to know more about such lesser-known acts. So in the coming months, I plan to use this column to focus on more up-and-coming bands that folks might not be aware of just yet. With that in mind, meet Sannhet, the instrumental Brooklyn trio of bassist AJ Annunziata, drummer Christopher Todd, and guitarist John Refano. Onstage they’re a marvel; with Annunziata manning an intense light show, they’re one of my favorite live acts. When you listen to their excellent second album, Revisionist, out March 3 on Flenser, you'll wonder how all this noise could come from just three guys.

Sannhet have been labelled, among other things, “post-back metal,” “math rock,” “instru-metal,” and “experimental,” though none of those are quite right. With the new record, which can be heard in its entirety below, the sounds are bigger, harsher, more melodic, and just flat-out better than their 2013 debut album, Known Flood. It gives goosebumps. You’ll punch the air. It may make you cry. It’s like if Godspeed You! Black Emperor sat down to make an album of soaring-but-concise post-punk anthems.

I spoke with the band about the beauty of avoiding classification, the idea of endless revision, and what it means to be making music in New York when nobody else sounds like you.

Pitchfork: Do you think it's more difficult to get noticed as an instrumental band without a traditional frontperson?

AJ Annunziata: When I joined the band, it was just three dudes onstage, and we didn't really have a focal point. So we moved [drummer] Chris [Todd] up to the front and introduced our light show, which replaces the singer and drives home the conceptual shit we're trying to put across—it makes the show more interesting without having a guy running around screaming. When you have a singer, the songs are committed to the emotions or ideas that the lyrics carry. But if there's anything that Chris and John don't like to do, it's to subscribe to any one particular idea.

John Refano: Having no singer allows you to give the music your own meaning. Hopefully people aren't thinking: "Oh, this is missing something." Instead, it's one big immersive experience live. On the record, we make up for it by the sheer amount of things going on.

Pitchfork: How choreographed is the light show?

AA: It's meant to be as choreographed as possible—I trigger the flood lights and the strobe lights with my foot—but it does still have a little bit of openness and responsiveness to the set. John and Chris were apprehensive about the lights because, again, it was like defining a theme or idea to the songs, and they're very much about keeping that ambiguous and interpretative. So they made a rule for me when I was making the projections: They cannot be tied to any one realistic physical thing or idea. So I did a lot of animations akin to animation experiments from the early part of the 20th century.

__Pitchfork: You're about to play some shows with Liturgy, who are also doing a few dates with Lightning Bolt. Do you feel any musical kinship with these bands?

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JR: Maybe not so much musically, but more in terms of the ideas behind the band. Liturgy was “sort of” a metal band, and, similarly, we use a lot of the aesthetics that may come from metal—extreme volume and noise—but we try to put it in a different context. We're all bands using heavy music but doing something different. With the guitar, for example, there's riffs here and there, but in general my main interest is building up drones like a Wall of Sound—lots of textures and layers where it's more like a big wash rather than tight metal riffing.

Pitchfork: All three groups—you, Liturgy, and Lightning Bolt—also obviously have very good drummers.

JR: Yeah, especially with the way we present Chris drumming up front, he's right there in your face. He's not just some dude that's in the back keeping it together. He's a focal point. He's right in the middle of the stage. People connect with that a lot.

Christopher Todd: Drummers don't get to do that too often, and I love it. I'm always trying to challenge myself to not do the same thing. I take pride in being the backbone of the band.

JR: And since there’s no singer and the guitar parts are textural, the drums and bass have a lot of room to have their own voice.

AA: The interesting thing about the way we write music is that it’s like an interpersonal argument between all of us. The way Chris structures a song is considerably different from the way I would construct a song or the way John does and these different approaches all complement each other. I'm always trying to make a song sound more like something you can bite into, something more understated or even poppy. Chris is trying to make it as technical as he can while still making it delicate and interesting. John is trying to take everything that we're doing and make it as dissonant and strange and unrecognizable as possible.

Pitchfork: When you named the album Revisionist, what did you have in mind?

JR: We play around with our aesthetic and our name and our image a lot, and the album involves this idea of how you can change things to mean whatever you want at whatever time by revising them, and then that becomes the new proof. It could also be a nod to our progression as a band, and as we move forward as a group, we make it seem like that's what we've always done.

AA: Nobody in the band wants to commit to a specific idea, but when John suggested the name Revisionist, I was immediately able to make all these connections to all the other creative movements we've had within the band, the artwork, the videos, just the iterative process that it takes to write some of these songs. It really is an internal struggle with all of us to birth a song. I'm not saying that to sound like we're a bunch of kids fighting all the time, but everybody cares so much about so many details. There's nothing that is not completely deliberate. We recorded two or three versions of demos for each of these new songs a year and a half ago, and they sound almost nothing like some of the finished versions. Chris and John are very much particular in the way they work and it's really challenging working with them, but they always want it to be a little bit better and that can definitely be seen in our studio time. We spent a lot of money making the album.

JR: It’s this process of infinite revisionism. When we went to the studio to mix the album, it was kind of ironic going in there and finishing an album called Revisionist because once we cut the mix our ability to revise it was basically gone. So Revisionist was birthed when the ability to revise it was finally removed.

AA: Also, some fans have taken the songs and done their own lyrics to them and uploaded them to YouTube, and that’s the kind of involvement we want to foster with our fanbase. I like that people have taken a thing that we've created and then made it their own.

Pitchfork: You're not an easy band to pigeonhole genre-wise, which seems to go with everything we’ve discussed so far—you escape easy categorization.

JR: That's ultimately a triumph, in my opinion, especially because it's almost impossible to make something that's unique and original in this day and age. I hope it stays that way because if somebody can say, "Sannhet is this type of music," we're not really doing what we're trying to do.

When you hear somebody describe us, it's almost like you hear what they are into and what they grew up with and the things they think are cool, which I think is great. Metal writers will compare us to all these metal genres. People who are into spacier music will find connections there, and people who are into more experimental music might attach it to other things.

Pitchfork: Do you feel any connections to New York City or do you think your music is coming from different places and exists outside of a certain scene?

JR: I'm influenced by living in the city and being a part of the city, but I don't know about being influenced by the other bands that are quote-unquote "in the scene" because I always struggle to try to find bands that are related to our sound, aside from just being loud or noisy or heavy. New York is an amazing place to live, but there's also a darkness to it. I almost feel like our music could be the perfect soundtrack to being in New York City because it's everything and it's nothing, and you can do with it whatever you want.

AA: We’re often the weird guys out in conversations with our friends that have bands in the area because we're either too soft for metal or too hard for indie. We just kind of float around. We're the weird angry guys in black post-rock outfits.