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Wallingford’s wondrous metal band October File might have spent a little too much time in the local art house theatre and adjoining obscure book store during the four years preceding the release of their latest album The Application of Loneliness, Ignorance, Misery, Love and Despair - An Introspective of the Human Condition.

This is a whacking good record. As a concept piece, it is silly nonsense dredged up from Eastern European essays on emotional ow-wees, but as a metal album for the head banger intelligentsia, the album’s first track “I F--k The Day” bears profound meaning.

Vocalist Ben Hollyer delivers his steely antipathy amid one of the heaviest guitar grinds ever heard on album in this genre. The music doesn’t just snarl, it seethes as it shakes a black-leather glove an inch from your face. Killing Joke’s “Follow The Leader” hovers with spectral influence behind all the tracks.

Loneliness is the cost of fierce self-determination, and October File highlights the sacrifice in “Heroes Are Welcome.” Like one political tract stacked atop another, every song lures you in with an attention-grabbing riff, then pounds your will to resist by insisting you join along in their anthems.

Hard and bleak, the songs come at you like the stab of headlights turning the corner into the alley of an iron-curtain night. Hollyer roils insistently, hypnotically, through the album, The eleven and half minute anger-dance “The Water” is pinned upon Hollyer’s doom-drenched vocals, which helps propel the chugging track toward its symbolic drowning in an ocean of life’s relentless tragedy.

In all its grimness, “The Water” is littered with great riffs circling the stormy surface like rescue ships beckoning survivors.

Their jaws clenched in pitiless resolve, the duo of guitarist of Matt Lerwill and bassist Steve Beatty are responsible for the remarkable heaviness. They drive the album as pilot and co-pilot of the riff steamroller. Drummer John Watt pounds down on any bump left in their steamy, tarry wake. Watt is impeccably wild, like a Godflesh Keith Moon, yet injects a surprising swing into the songs. “Elation” is a revelation of Watt and Beatty molesting an anthemic singalong with a seditious danceability.

The Application of Loneliness… is given to a self-absorbed moment with the winceable “Upon Reflection,” with its gorgeous acoustic guitar and “Knights in White Satin” post-poetic passage. The album also suffers monotonous drone as one good song slams into another like a chain collision on a fogbound turnpike.

Hollyer’s choice of never-changing vocal dynamics glues the songs together but also hampers their ability to stand on their own. Fierce determination as tossed out through a bullhorn can get old after a while. Regardless, October File have forged an album certain to make you embrace your loneliness and bang your head.

(released June 10^th, 2014 on Candlelight Records)