The band's fifth full-length is baffling first and foremost because it's not meant to be baffling. As guitarist, mastermind and band nucleus Seth Hecox explains, the album is less about reinventing heavy music than it is reinventing Becoming the Archetype. That's not to say listeners won't find the band doing its usual mind-warping and genre-bending, but the point of this album wasn't to transcend the artform of metal music, it was to master it.

"I AM is 100% head banging riffs," Hecox says. "Gone are the sitars and horns of Celestial Completion. Instead, we've crafted an album full of the heaviest and most technical songs we've ever written."

Recorded with producer Shane Frisby (Bury Your Dead, The Ghost INside), I AM, as the title suggests, is also a statement of an album that puts a new stamp on who Becoming the Archetype is and what it stands for following an inter-band shakeup - one that cleared the path for Hecox to assemble a true dream team of musicians around him.

I AM track listing: