Heart of Oak, Anciients’ 2013 full-length debut, was a varied, artful affair, with ethereal acoustic passages and an obvious breadth of influences. Call it thinking man’s metal, maybe with a smidgen more emphasis on “thinking” than “metal”, more likely to appeal to fans of Opeth—or even King Crimson—than the drink-16-beers-and-mosh-till-you-puke contingent.

That’s fine by us, mind you. It’s an impressive, ambitious album that does Vancouver metal proud. But it’s no less welcome that Voice of the Void kicks out the jams a bit more. The new LP—which, like Heart of Oak, was produced by Jesse Gander, and is being distributed by European label Season of Mist—is a more direct, riff-heavy affair, focusing on the shimmering, building interplay between singer, songwriter, and guitarist Kenny Cook and fellow axeman and co-founder Chris Dyck.

Cook, talking to the Straight from his home in Mission, where he’s looking after his young son Charlie, agrees that it’s a more straightforward, more “metal” offering. “Voice of the Void is just heavier, in all aspects,” he says. “But it wasn’t a conscious choice for that to happen, it’s more what comes at the time and what I feel when I’m writing.”

In fact, the writing of the album was informed by a fairly difficult stretch in Cook’s life, he explains. “My wife Heather had a kid between these two albums, and a few days after my son was born, she had some major heart complications, relating to her pregnancy. So I spent probably a month with her in intensive care in St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, and all that was going down right as I was starting to compose and put stuff together. So it put everything on hold, and when I came back, I guess I had a lot of issues to get out of myself from that time. That’s just sort of how it came out—heavier and more aggressive.”

His wife’s sickness “hit home” for all the members of the band, too, because it happens that Cook is married to Dyck’s sister. He got to know her when he and his Anciients bandmate played in their Turbonegro-esque previous project SprëadEagle. (Both Heather and Charlie are “doing great now”, he assures Straight readers).

The personal crisis doesn’t really enter the lyrics—at least, not directly. “I didn’t really write through my own eyes, so to speak,” Cook says. “I think the aspects we wrote about on the album are more problems we’re having with mankind.”

For example: “Buried in Sand”, the second song, takes on “war over religion, people being suppressed by dictators, and slaves uprising and taking back what’s rightfully theirs”.

The timely offering begins with some of the harshest passages on Voice of the Void, sounding more like technical death metal than the band’s go-to progressive approach, with rough vocals from Cook (who also sings the clean parts on the album, switching back and forth; you’d be forgiven for thinking it was two different dudes).

Eventually, the song arrives at murder, with Cook describing the killing of a dictator whose “time has come”: “I split your skull, tearing the heart out/Holding your soul up to the sky.”

It’s positively Old Testament, and just a little bloodthirsty, though Cook says the band is “not that political. We’re not like the old punk bands, it’s just sort of a view from the outside of things that would be awesome to see change, but probably won’t.”

But like all Anciients songs, “Buried in Sand” doesn’t just hit one note. At almost 11 minutes long—not an atypical length for an Anciients song—it takes the listener on a journey, developing and changing, layering many influences into a surprisingly unified whole.

That is precisely what Cook is aiming for, he tells the Straight: “You can kinda hear certain bands putting a ‘death metal part’ and then a ‘super emo part’, and it just sounds like a part with a part, but with Anciients, I want there to be some flow within the music, to make things intertwine with themselves. That’s the biggest challenge, making everything as seamless as possible, like it was meant to be, as opposed to two contrasting things put side by side.”

Ultimately, the choices of what goes where are determined by what serves the song best. Take, for example, the decision of whether to sing a passage in a clean vocal or a death growl.

“When I started this group, I wasn’t aiming for it to be a metal band,” Cook reveals. “I wanted it to be more of a rock band, so clean vocals were what I wanted, the majority of the time, but once the music for a song is written, if there’s a part that’s super heavy, and vocals will sound silly being clean over top, I just go the heavier route. It’s basically just whatever matches the music best.”

Anciients play a Voice of the Void record-release party at the Rickshaw on December 2.