Since the 2022 release of the audacious Spirit of Ecstasy, Imperial Triumphant have suffered from a mid-bill malaise. Too established to open and too eccentric to headline, they’ve been relegated to the center slot on tours, working the room from behind their gilded masks for 45 minutes before the likes of Voivod, Zeal & Ardor, or Carcass step on stage. But Imperial Triumphant make hourlong albums that are lumbering chimeras, monsters conjured by fusing shimmering plates of heavy metal across skeletons of jazz and Afro-Latin drums. The jewelry? American minimalism, field-recorded etcetera, and even barbershop quartets. That was, no shit, Kenny G shrieking his way through “Merkurius Gilded” on that last record; Mr. Bungle’s Trey Spruance produced its predecessor. It’s nigh impossible to communicate that much live with a handful of eight-minute tracks to first-time listeners.

So this time, Imperial Triumphant gave themselves an ultimatum: Keep every song to five minutes or less, and cut an album in five days with longtime friend and metal’s master of maximalist minimalism, Krallice’s Colin Marston. The idiosyncrasy hasn’t vanished, from a 47-second grindcore paroxysm and the faux-vintage cigarette jingle that follows to the segues from buzzsaw death metal to Maracutu and back (with the help of Pantera’s Dave Lombardo) that frame “Pleasuredome.” Goldstar is every bit as wild and relentless as its predecessor; it’s just that the shifts in momentum are easier to trace here, the melodies a bit less obfuscated. It’s also the sort of powerhouse LP that could push the band out of that center slot and to top billing.

Imperial Triumphant have forever been locked in a love-resent relationship with New York City, the springboard and subject for all their albums. (That grindcore burst is called “NEWYORKCITY.”) Their New York is, rightly, a place of possibility and putrescence, of sex and sexual violence, of greed and greatness. They cram it all into these songs. “Pleasuredome” is prurient and mean, with Steve Blanco’s bassline supplying the lurid wink of some Law & Order spinoff’s theme. Rising through a Spaghetti Western guitar line that’s as cold as Gotham, “Lexington Delirium” is a bludgeoning death metal number about architecture, or about how visions for “The Metropolis of Tomorrow” of visionary architect Hugh Ferriss have collapsed into the chaos of congestion. When Zachary Erzin grunts of “venereal melody” during “Gomorrah Nouveaux,” the guitars turn radiant, a map of heaven and hell rendered in an instant.

But the coup of Goldstar is “Hotel Sphinx,” four minutes and 50 seconds that overrun with enough ideas—No Wave dissonance, warped New Age pastorals, total death metal oblivion—that they could outline an entire album. It is hooky, propulsive, and fun, the kind of song you indeed keep with you when the headliner steps on stage. And if it is not about Donald Trump, it is certainly about someone like him, someone who trades on personal celebrity and consensus gullibility to pillage his audience. Obsessed with Art Deco and Stanley Kubrick, long leaning into songs that could push toward the 10-minute mark, Imperial Triumphant never seemed like an anthem-for-right-now kind of band. And yet here we are, looking back at ourselves from the glimmer of their golden masks.