Loudersound revisits Candiria's 1999 album The Process Of Self-Development, arguing the Brooklyn band's third record remains an underappreciated landmark of progressive metal despite rarely being filed alongside prog rock's usual suspects. The New York outfit fused hardcore punk, jazz, hip-hop and abstract noise into a sound the piece likens to a heavier, more chaotic cousin of Tool, Meshuggah and Devin Townsend, released at a time when rap-rock dominated the mainstream. The retrospective makes the case that the album still sounds startlingly ahead of its time more than two decades on.

The band's evolution is traced from their 1995 debut Surrealistic Madness, described as a promising but unformed work, through 1997's Beyond Reasonable Doubt, before culminating in The Process Of Self-Development. That third album is singled out for its punishing yet unconventional songwriting, built on freewheeling, jazz-inflected riffs that the article suggests outdo even Meshuggah's celebrated polyrhythms in complexity, all delivered under frontman Carley Coma's hardcore-style vocals.