According to Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan, personal growth demands embracing the pain of “that dark minute.” Lucky for us, then—Lateralus provides not one, but 79 of the darkest minutes this side of a rectal probe.

In the five long years since the multiplatinum Aenima, Tool’s faithful fan base has supported its prog-metal heroes’ struggle to escape from Zoo Records, been introduced to Keenan’s “feminine side” through his melodic side project, A Perfect Circle, and watched rap-metal abscond with the guy-rock grail in Tool’s absence.

On their third full-length album, Keenan, guitarist Adam Jones, bassist Justin Chancellor and drummer Danny Carey snub anything that smacks of mookery, and, like Radiohead last year, choose art-rock over TRL appeal.

Any song shorter than five minutes (except for two brief between-song interludes) gets hunted down and stretched on a rack. “The Grudge,” for example, is an eight-minute feast of tempo changes with more detours than the road to a Florida polling station, while “Reflection” logs in at a bit-too-ambitious 11:08. With a restless rhythm section, scraping guitar and Keenan’s suffocated vocals, Lateralus sounds like Black Sabbath jamming with Genesis at the bottom of a coal shaft.

Characteristically vague salvos—the title track’s call to “ride the spiral to the end,” for example—are sure to be scrawled in the margins of high-school notebooks, while tantrums “Triad” and “Ticks and Leeches” pack Reznorian vitriol: In the latter, Keenan blasts biters and Bizkits alike, spitting “Suck it/You little parasite/Take what you want and then go.”

Strangely enough, though, Keenan’s weirdly affirming search for the beauty within the pain still manages to carry the day. Amid the maelstrom of “Parabola,” Keenan yearns to “feel connected,” to “celebrate the chance to be/Alive and breathing”—all of which makes Lateralus just about the most punishing warm fuzzy you’ll get this year.