The band’s eighth studio album towers alongside its best work, offering both peerless, full-speed-ahead blitzkriegs and slower, heavier epics like the 10-plus-minute “Sanctioned Annihilation.”
Magus, their first full-length solo album since 2014’s towering Heathen, teases out the tension between melody and abrasion, like a severely narcotized In Utero.
On the thrilling Stranger Fruit, elements of gospel and the blues coil like twisted roots around the album’s tallest pillars of fury, resulting in anthems at once heavier and more soulful than the “Satanic spirituals” on last year’s Devil Is Fine.