Of all the bands you could call on to soundtrack a post-apocalyptic surf movie, the psych rock riffasaurus rex that is Black Mountain makes a pretty inspired choice. The Canadian band’s expansive mix of tripped-out prog and galloping power chords seems the perfect embodiment of a surf culture that thrills at the concept of the big blue beyond, lying on the fringes of civilisation.

It’s convenient, then, that the band have partnered with surf company Globe to lend their monolithic sound to the company’s recently released end-of-the-world-but-hey-surf’s-up epic Year Zero. The film appears to follow a gnarly group of surfer dudes and dudettes as they rattle around a surprisingly utopian post-apocalypse, hanging ten and tooling around the desert in muscle cars. Based on the trailer, it seems to straddle the line between esoteric art project and postmodern marketing campaign. Black Mountain, for their part, have contributed five new tracks and four old ones for the soundtrack.

Without seeing the film itself, it’s impossible to describe how the new tracks mesh as an audiovisual experience, but it’s clear that the band are having a lot of fun casting off the limitations of structured songwriting in favour of building verdant, sun-baked soundscapes that shift from one musical set-piece to the next with their own elemental momentum. ‘Mary Lou’ gathers force like a wave, a thrumming bassline slowly built up by a throaty, chanting choir before crashing into a deluge of stoner-rock guitars, lightning guitar solos and the breathy incantations of vocalists Stephen McBean and Amber Webber.

Elsewhere, the new material moves at a more languorous pace, with tracks like ‘Embrace Euphoria’ and ‘In Sequence’ spinning hypnotic tapestries of synth, like a sun-bleached Vangelis on a vision quest. The beguiling atmosphere of these tracks is a reminder that Black Mountain have always been better with nuance than their reputation would suggest, although the painfully earnest spoken word sections sprinkled throughout (“find your truth”, “embrace the earth mother” and so on) occasionally take the tone across the city limits and into Sillytown.

By contrast, the older songs chosen for the soundtrack are some of the band’s ballsiest riff-based numbers, and they serve as a perfect counterpoint to the new tracks’ looseness. For every abstract synth section there’s a corresponding crescendo like ‘Tyrants’ or ‘Wilderness Heart’, all roaring guitars and epic choruses. The old stuff is impeccably mixed and integrated with the new material too, with each track morphing into the next in a way that ties the set together as a surprisingly tight package. Both as an immaculately presented pseudo-concept album and as a refresher course on the shamanic power rock that Black Mountain have made their trademark, Year Zero is a soundtrack well worth investigating.