If you knew absolutely nothing about Ben Frost’s creative approach before listening to the first notes of his 2024 album Scope Neglect, his first non-soundtrack solo release in seven years, you’d be forgiven for assuming he was a straight-up metal musician with a fondness for stark pauses in between riffs. That very much is the nature of the album’s opener “Lamb Shift,” but it’s also of a piece with the feedback explorations of many of his earlier works, and from there Scope Neglect dives into a wonderfully tense and wired flow of compositions balanced between the power of the almighty headbang, the discipline of repetition, and the sense of deep, resonant sonic serenities and vast echoes. Using the work of guitarist Greg Kubacki and bassist Liam Andrews as the core, delivering a series of monumental but quick and brusque parts, Frost sends them into spiralling depths, twists and chops them into tightly-wound collages, and otherwise reshapes them remarkably on songs like “Turning the Prism” and “Tritium Bath.” Credit also to the wry humor of calling one of the more contemplative efforts, in a nod to a noted Nirvana lyric, “Load Up On Guns, Bring Your Friends.”