Over the past decade, Montreal trio BIG|BRAVE have released albums through both Southern Lord and Thrill Jockey, a track record that speaks to their fluency in both bone-shaking doom metal and post-rock experimentation. But their first language was folk music. In the years leading up to their tremorous 2014 debut, Feral Verdure, BIG|BRAVE founders Robin Wattie and Mathieu Ball performed early gigs as an acoustic-oriented duo. Even as they transitioned to electric instrumentation and loaded up on percussive firepower to become one of the most punishing and prolific bands in the contemporary avant-metal landscape, BIG|BRAVE’s emotional core has remained largely intact—in their hands, noise is simply a megaphone to amplify the unrest embedded in their songs from day one.

But while their official discography has turned both more expansive and abrasive—culminating in the throat-shredding epics of 2023’s Nature Morte— BIG|BRAVE also took a detour back to their folk-song roots with 2021’s Leaving None But Small Birds, a rustic retreat with Rhode Island metal mutants the Body that was ultimately less Earth than earthy, complete with revamps of dustbowl standards like “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Once I Had a Sweetheart.” You could say that A Chaos of Flowers is another collaborative archival project that reanimates ancient texts. In this case, the key contributors are summoned from the grave.

The majority of tracks on A Chaos of Flowers take their lyrics or inspiration from poets spanning countries, cultures, and eras—from American icon Emily Dickinson to British-Parisian lesbian raconteur Renne Vivien to Japanese proto-feminist Yosano Akiko to Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson aka Tekahionwake. (A true tortured poets’ department, as it were.) But they find their point of intersection in Wattie’s identity as a queer woman of mixed heritage living in a bilingual city. If Leaving None But Small Birds journeyed through the past to reconnect with storytelling tradition, then A Chaos of Flowers is more about recontextualizing old wisdom as premonitions of our current condition.

As such, the album sounds less like a loud rock band mellowing out than a loud rock band sculpting their squall with all the craft and care of folk music. This isn’t so much doom metal as doomed metal—like 1,000-foot-high sand castles, these songs feel majestic yet ephemeral, as if they could dissolve into the ocean at any moment. In the past, the band might’ve used the sinister riff of “Not Speaking of the Ways” as the foundation for a monstrous march—and the presence of guest guitarist Tashi Dorji and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi certainly intensifies its nauseous grandeur. But drummer Tasy Hudson lays off the kick pedal and floor tom to tap out a tentative rhythm on her cymbals, allowing the song to float instead of crush. It’s a treatment that perfectly mirrors Akiko’s source verse, a freeze-frame portrait of a love so strong, it has the power to stop time and provide momentary sanctuary.

For all of their brute force, BIG|BRAVE’s most powerful weapon has always been Wattie’s voice, whose natural radiance cuts through the sludge to foreground an expressiveness rarely heard in a doom context. On A Chaos of Flowers, she’s not so much trying to overpower the storm as stake out the calm within it. The album’s chilling opener, “I felt a funeral,” is based on Dickinson’s 1861 poem “I felt a funeral, in my brain,” a vivid rumination on the precarity of sanity, depicted here as a showdown between Wattie’s trembling but resolute melody—which suggests a goth-blues spin on “House of the Rising Sun”—and the slow-motion waves of fuzz that threaten to swallow her whole. On the album’s dark, droning centerpiece, “theft,” the dynamic is reversed: As Wattie recites Esther Popel’s namesake poem about an old woman cruelly beaten down by the elements in the dead of winter, her tone almost feels conspiratorial, as if she’s summoning the thick sheets of feedback that close in from all sides.

Wattie’s own songwriting contributions feel of a piece with her muses: the ashen-skied ballad “canon: in canon” (featuring the deceptively tranquil fretwork of Thrill Jockey stablemate Marisa Anderson) weaves similar thematic connections between nature, mental health, and survival, while “quotidian : solemnity” reinforces the lyrical focus by doing away with percussion completely to let Wattie’s scabrous soliloquy hover inside a thick thundercloud of distortion. In these meditative moments, BIG|BRAVE boldly stretch their signature sound to its abstract extremes while retaining its doom-metal essence, and in doing so, they affirm that this album’s symbiotic relationship with its predecessor goes beyond a shared floral motif: If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force. On the closing interpretation of Tekahionwake’s “Moonset,” Wattie declares, “I may not all your meaning understand/But I have touched your soul in shadow-land.” On A Chaos of Flowers, the heaviness has much to do with the weight of the words as the intensity of the sound.