Despite the history-evoking name, the time for Anciients is now. The local metal quartet is riding a wave of hype over its pummelling and prog-leaning debut LP, Heart of Oak, which was touted on music blogs and in riff-celebrating publications like Guitar World even before its release last month. In addition, the outfit just got back to town after playing packed clubs on a plush tour with metal vets Death, and has another trip opening for Ohio thrashers Skeletonwitch starting at the end of the month. While amped on the acclaim, the band is refreshingly levelheaded when talking about all the attention of late.

“We’re definitely looking forward to harsher realities,” guitarist-vocalist Kenneth Cook jokes humbly in the back of a Commercial Drive coffeehouse, where he’s seated with bassist Aaron “Boon” Gustafson and drummer Mike Hannay. “I don’t plan on having big dressing rooms full of food and beer,” Gustafson adds, noting that the gang, which also includes guitarist-vocalist Chris Dyck, would be just as happy eating 7-11 hot dogs on tour as opposed to the backstage spreads they received on their last trek.

Though it’s just released its first full-length, the group took shape in 2010 following the collapse of long-running rockers SprëadEagle, in which Cook, Dyck, and Gustafson all played. Opting to stick together after the breakup, the trio, along with original Anciients drummer Eugene Parkomenko, decided to move from the straightforward, high-octane tunes of SprëadEagle into a more mind-expanding direction.

After bringing Hannay into the fold to record its two-song “Snakebeard” single in 2011, the band took to Burnaby’s Hive Creative Labs in early 2012 to record Heart of Oak with producer Jesse Gander (Japandroids, White Lung). Describing the vast, rolling structures of the LP as epic is an understatement.

With but one song running below the six-minute mark—a brief, mid-album acoustic interlude called “One Foot in the Light”—Heart of Oak’s multipassage journeys run the heavy-music gamut. The nearly eight-and-a-half-minute “Falling in Line”, for instance, initially works clean-driven guitar sweeps and an atmospherically swung rhythm in its intro. Cook later buries listeners beneath a bluesy, fret-blazing solo before the combo cranks the amps to run through complex licks and Earth’s-crust-cracking rhythms that channel Mastodon, Iron Maiden’s ultraproggy Seventh Son of a Seventh Son period, and Neurosis. The narrative of “The Longest River”, meanwhile, has a drifter crawling through a wasteland atop both a decrepit doom groove and an extended, double-kick-employing thrash session.

“The kind of music that we’re writing, it has a lot of styles included in it,” Cook offers of Anciients’ heady compositions. “If we were to try and display all of those influences within a three-minute song, it would sound like a bowl of mashed potatoes. It kind of has to be longer to create transitions into other styles and set stuff up.”

The act’s lyrics, sung and screamed by both Dyck and Cook, likewise spiral into extraordinary realms, whether influenced by Egyptian mythology (“Raise the Sun”) or inspired by the band’s own imagination. Cook points to “Overthrone” as a creative high point for the group.

“It was about a race of kings that ruined a planet and went to space to escape it. When they return, their fortresses and planet have been overthrown. There’s nothing left of what they ruled before,” he explains. “Stuff like that is what I like to write about—pretty much a rock ’n’ roll fantasy.”

Elsewhere in the set, the seafaring “Giants” sets up a yarn about a crew of warriors facing off against a battalion of towering behemoths. In between warp-speed blasts and gun-turret guitar trills, the subjects of “Faith and Oath” plot an ascension via ceremonial serpent-strangling activities.

While the topics tend to run toward the fantastical, some of Heart of Oak’s imagery was influenced by real-life tragedies, including the death of Dyck’s stepmother, Lisa. The band hit the theme poetically on “Flood and Fire”, with Cook hinting at their collective hurt through mournful lines like “crashing waves, seeking death beneath the sea, the life will fade”.

“It’s metaphorically speaking through natural disaster—tsunamis and such, and how it can totally change your life in an instant,” the musician clarifies. “I tied that into what was going on with us at the time, with family members having health problems.”

Instrumental closer “For Lisa”, meanwhile, is a more visceral tribute. Perhaps the most out-there piece on the LP, it homes in on a jam-band boogie built around a train’s steam whistle, organ, and peach-eatin’, Allman Brothers–style twin-guitar leads. Anciients has yet to play the track live, but hints that it may be unveiled on-stage sometime soon.

Following the upcoming Skeletonwitch tour, Anciients will take time off so Cook can marry Dyck’s sister and honeymoon in Portugal, but it’ll be back on the road by the fall. The act hopes it’ll have new tunes to tout by that time, too.

“It’s all pretty much in the same vein, if you can describe that vein—just random shit that we’ll somehow manage to stitch together,” Cook hints of the next set of complex compositions the band has slowly been tweaking on and off the road.

“The one song we’ve come close to finishing is insane,” Gustafson adds. “I just want to make sure that the next record we make and the one after that keep getting better and better. Judging from this one [song], that’s the way it’s going.”