When the members of S.C.U.M. first took to the stages of East London clubs in 2008, it was as if they'd sought nothing more than to embody Antonin Artaud's Manifesto for a Theatre Of Cruelty. Draped all in black, they conjured a terrorizing, resplendent noise, ditching melody and harmony for the screech of their amplifiers. As expected, the British press lapped it up, then turned on them, not incorrectly, for failing to proffer anything resembling an actual tune. Rakish young frontman Thomas Cohen reflects on it now without repentance: "We were seventeen…it was kind of like when kids draw pictures. It hasn't been tainted, it's more pure."

Still, a proper tune does have a way of increasing one's scope of influence. And their debut album, Again Into Eyes (released this month on Mute Records), is nothing short of a revelatory one-eighty from their beginnings as agents of dissonant provocation. A few lines into the ravishing opening track "Faith Unfolds," with its church-like organ and soaring atmospherics, it's clear that Cohen has become the lavish, Byronic poet he'd probably always meant to be. As he heroically intones, "I trace my faith where I stand in time," there's a powerful feeling of music-as-religious-awakening--even if it may in fact be a godless religion. S.C.U.M. stand strikingly athwart a contemporary music culture that worships the middling and laps up the banal.

"I've always been attracted to a sense of grandeur," Cohen beams unapologetically. "That English sense of extravagance, which nowadays is just so unfashionable. Yet bands that are shit seem to get away with so much."

And like their English forebears, from Webster to Waugh to one Steven Patrick Morrissey, S.C.U.M. are uncanny in their ability to weave the sacred into the profane. To wit, the glorious washes of analog synth that make the eerie, celestial "Whitechapel" seem almost a requiem and gospel hymn at once. Its accompanying video, as well as the one for majestic first single "Amber Hands"--both directed by arch collaborator Matthew Stone--are beautifully haunting, quasi-surrealist masterpieces.

Cohen explains the ethereal grandiosity of Again Into Eyes as the product of, "listening to Morricone soundtracks, to English composer Basil Kirchin, a lot of Serge Gainsbourg, and Low by Bowie constantly."

Unfairly and lazily tagged by some as East London scenesters because of a fraternal connection to the Horrors and Cohen's tabloid-chronicled relationship with Peaches Geldof, S.C.U.M.'s dazzling, nearly flawless debut may have proven them to be one of the more serious musical forces to emerge from the Class of 2011. Appropriately, mythology building moments just seem to occur in their proximity.

"We'd just finished the last song," Cohen recalls of the pastoral recording sessions for Again Into Eyes. "Then I went outside, the moon was really bright, lighting up the whole field behind the studio, and clouds just suddenly covered the moon. Close by to us was an army base, and at that exact moment these huge helicopters the size of shopping malls flew over and just shot out these spectacular flares."

Grandeur, thy name is S.C.U.M.