It’s easy to slip into the habit of expecting disappointment when it comes to embarking on a new (or, in this case, not-so-new) doom release, since more often than not sloth, repetition and endless duration are mistaken for substance and ritual grandeur. Lost Hours, refreshingly, are the real deal, and (deep breath) ‘IV: The Silence Of The Perpetual Choir In Heaven’ manages to summon the genre’s essential ingredients: heaviness, depth and true, spirit-crushing misery. Mixing knife-glint prettiness with leaden atonality the band come off somewhere between Corrupted and Thergothon, wearily traipsing between vast heraldic riffs as though each note is draining them yet further of dwindling life force. Opening track ‘…And Masses Spat Upon All That is Holy’ clocks in at almost eighteen minutes and earns every blighted second, while the brilliantly-titled and comparatively lean ‘Roman Polanski Is A Monster’ manages to warp your perception of time while slowly pounding you to death with a chair leg. Ugly and exhausting as it is it’s also really exciting, and given that this is a reissue of a 2018 release my hopes are incredibly high as to the depths they may yet plumb.