Ferrum Sidereum is gloriously unhinged, landing with the impact of a joke told at an unbearable volume. This is at heart a jazz trio, but playing the language of djent and groove metal with an obsession with riffs and endurance, and a loose and raucous execution that’s splendidly messy.

With violently off-kilter grooves and a punishing momentum, Ferrum Sidereum is full of absurd heaviness filtered through strange and tense textures. Golgotha sounds like Meshuggah being asked to perform on Sesame Street. Drums, bass and saxophone playing what sounds like djent or modern groove metal, with the saxophone playing a key destabilising force. Where palm-muted guitars tend towards clinical mechanical precision, Luca T. Mai’s baritone saxophone squawks with a chaotic snarl, and the result sounds closer to the warped funk of Primus than the grid-locked brutality of djent, as the bass prowls and lurches.

At 80 minutes, Ferrum Sidereum is unapologetically expansive, with most tracks pushing past the seven-minute mark in an exhausting spell. Masters of tension, Zu repeat phrases over and over with grooves tightening into knots that you can’t quite count. A.I. Hive Mind spirals into full-blown freakouts evoking the feral intensity of John Zorn, while others like Kether and Pleroma lean into atmopshere and dread. Pads, hammond organ and hammered dulcimer expand the palette with subtle embellishments with enormous cinematic ambition, and the record often feels closer to soundtrack work than jazz or metal, conjuring images of vast machinery grinding, and unknowable rituals.

The Celestial Bull and the White Lady captures the hypnotic build of a classic Tool jam where repetitious drum passages become transcendent, and the title track closes the record with an uncountable phrase repeated and hammered into the ground in a staggering endurance test. Ferrum Sidereum is incredibly entertaining considering the vast 80-minute runtime, conjuring a staggering range of moods with a limited core setup.

Saxophone figures loop insistently while the drums and bass orbit in completely different time signatures, interlocking with hypnotic effect, with tribal percussion repeating in the way that archaic, ritualistic extreme metal does and utterly stunning drumming. Time signatures blur as grooves spill fluidly into one another, collapsing and reforming, and you can dance and move to it even if you have no idea where the beat sits. The tension between groove and incomprehensibility is incomprehensibly groovy, with sound design mangled through aggressive phaser and flange effects that swallow huge swathes of the frequency range to create industrial walls of doom, taking a familiar effect and exaggerating it to an unfamiliar extreme.

With a raucous baritone sax honking at full force, everything is cranked to ten. Ferrum Sidereum is ridiculous and excessive, perpetually feeling as if something catastrophic is about to happen. Most of the album is built on tension, relentless insistence, and elevating your heart rate, and despite its length it’s the furthest thing from monotonous, with tracks unfolding in multi-section movements and breaking away from their hypnotic trance into wild exploding jam passages before snapping right back. This is confusing and overwhelming music with uncountable grooves and a very sharp impact. The limited instrumentation is no limit whatsoever thanks to the imagination and physical force on display. Sending you into a strange and disorienting world that’s loud and all-encompassing, there’s no apparent limits on how aggressively the trio are willing to abuse their effects pedals, sitting right on the outer edges of what most people would comfortably call music.

From claustrophobic dread to swaggering funk to ritualistic trance, this is three expert musicians building worlds with constantly escalating grooves, and the album feels less like a jazz album experimenting with metal influences, and much more like an experimental metal album that’s been completely stripped of the genre’s usual constraints. Where modern metal is often rigid and clinical, Ferrum Sidereum is loose and expressive, and the record is a towering achievement for fans of experimental jazz, modern extreme metal, or anyone interested in the collapse of genre borders.