Dissociation

The Dillinger Escape Plan

Party Smasher/Cooking Vinyl

Four stars

Going out not so much with a bang as a full-on detonation, New Jersey crew The Dillinger Escape Plan will retire after this sixth and final album. There are plenty of stylistic sidesteps among their patented brand of complex mathematical metal, as has been their moxie during two bruising decades of cult success.

Aural assault is wielded throughout, such as on opening million-miles-a-minute cry-for-help Limerent Death. But that's followed by moments where DEP variously invoke post-rock pioneers Slint's semi-spoken-word intonations (Wanting Not So Much to As To) and electronica overlord Aphex Twin's acid-­techno twitches (Fague).

Honeysuckle, meanwhile, rides off a discordance that will please fans of the band's brutal first album, while maintaining a twisted tunefulness in vocalist Greg Puciato's choruses. In many ways, the closing six-minute title track is a fitting epitaph to what DEP became: a restrained, grandiose, ambitious epic full of strings and fractured drumbeats indebted more to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds than extreme metal.

So long, gentlemen, and thanks for the tinnitus.