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I got into German funeral-doom band Ahab last year via obsessive YouTube sessions with tracks from their first full-length, 2006’s The Call of the Wretched Sea—an album pretty much entirely about Moby-Dick. They abandoned that tight focus on 2009’s The Divinity of Oceans, shifting to a broadly nautical theme. Their third full-length, The Giant, is due May 25 on Napalm Records, and its title cut is today’s 12 O’Clock Track.

This is a relatively delicate number for Ahab, with clean vocals by guest Herbrand Larsen of Enslaved and a quiet interlude about five and a half minutes in. But as usual for the band, the song moves with the stateliness of an iceberg, going nowhere in a hurry. Even after the interlude has clearly telegraphed that the distortion’s about to kick back in, it’s a full minute and a half until the guitars roar back to life—and then they just build and build atop a single repeated riff until the sound fills the room up to your eyeballs. Whether you find this sort of thing tedious or engrossing probably depends mostly on your temperament, and you probably already know what side of that fence I’m on. Listen for yourself after the jump:

Philip Montoro has been an editorial employee of the Reader since 1996 and its music editor since 2004. Pieces he has edited have appeared in Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing anthologies in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011. He shared two Lisagor Awards in 2019 for a story on gospel pioneer Lou Della Evans-Reid and another in 2021 for Leor Galil's history of Neo, and he’s also split three national awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia: one for multimedia in 2019 for his work on the TRiiBE collaboration the Block Beat, and two (in 2020 and 2022) for editing the music writing of Reader staffer Leor Galil. You can also follow him on Twitter.