If there is such a thing as the aural equivalent of being buried alive—and I’m not confident that there is, but I’ll get back to you—then the Los Angeles group Iress has found it. It’s not that their gripping new record Flaw is suffocating; it’s that it perfectly captures the feeling of sickening resignation, the moment you realize you’re completely fucked, and nothing you can do will change your situation, so you instead choose to close your eyes and lean into the fear. (Sound familiar?) The album offers a chest-collapsing assortment of riffs that ride the line between doom metal and shoegaze—fans of Starflyer 59’s first two records, take note—occasionally pausing for a somber, smoky ballad (“Nest”) or a bit of grim, throbbing post-rock (“Shallow”). The band’s divining rod is vocalist Michelle Malley, whose performance on this record will drop the jaw of anyone who hears it. Malley is not only a spectacularly gifted vocalist—the command she displays over her robust, purplish alto is breathtaking—she also knows that what the songs require is not emotional histrionics, but some elusive combination of blankness and bereftness, and she manages to nail it every damn time. About three minutes into “Shallow” she works a single syllable—”ah”—for forty-five seconds, going from hopeless to panicked to desperate to pissed-off. She manages to jam more raw human emotion into that one syllable than other artists manage over the course of an entire album.