Capricorns are a longstanding instrumental metal band from London. The quartet’s been around in one form or another since 2003, but River, Bear Your Bones, which comes out at the end of the month, is just their second full-length record. (It’s their “paean to Father Thames and the London Towne that spreads from its banks like a concrete cancer,” we’re told.) Musically, you wouldn’t be wrong to think about Pelican, but there’s a harder, sludgier, and darker edge to the playing — as you might expect from a band that end an album with an 11-minute epic called “Drinking Water From The Skull Of A Hanged Man.” Take a listen to the equally colorful “Tempered With The Blood Of Beasts.”

• The Capricorns – “Tempered With The Blood Of Beasts”Download

The doomier album opener “Broken Coffin Of The Venerable King” and “Seventh Child Of A Seventh Child,” the song that follows it on River, Bear Your Bones are both streaming at Capricorns’ Myspace. “Tempered With…” follows those two on the record, so if you play the three together, you’ll get a good sense of the collection as a whole.

River, Bear Your Bones is out 9/30 via Rise Above.