For those unfamiliar with the band, which is most of us, Katatonia are a mixture of death metal instruments, lyrical song-writing, folksy melodies, and Jonas Renkse - a Swede who sings with an Irish lilt, using folk trills and licks. The songs bubbling from this cauldron are beautiful and harsh, violent and graceful. This is peasant music for a shell shocked modern audience, as Lord of the Rings is peasant mythology.

And like Tolkien's thousand pages, Katatonia demands attention. You'd be forgiven for mistaking My Twin, the first single, for whiny-boy pop. The melody trips in sentence fragments over the ground of a failed relationship. Its chorus, a fortress of distortion guitar and icy synthesiser, sounds schizophrenic, a sort of pseudo-metal. So you switch song, and again, and again, trying to make the elements cohere. Then suddenly they do - gloriously - and you're in a fantastic modern folkscape, a humbling mix of passion, alienation, violence, technology, decay, and paranoia: or, as Renkse puts it, "sub-sequence, systematic violence, the great cold distance."

On stage, Katatonia is comfortingly good. They performed live in Jyväskylä's Lutakko club last month to a packed audience. There's no jumping about, no prostrating themselves. Renkse, behind a Samara-like sheet of hair, stands still, sings the songs the best he can, and thanks the audience afterwards. This is about the music. And the crowd, knowing this, go wild. This is - I kid you not - a grown-up, honest, modern artistic experience.

Buy it, and Viva Emptiness, today.