From Non-Alignment Pact:

What we’re looking at here is a style that uses some of the techniques of extreme metal, but which applies them to an aesthetic philosophy and a worldview that are basically the exact opposite of what you would find in extreme metal and especially in black metal. Given the skill and veracity with which those techniques are executed, I don’t think it’s an option to put Liturgy’s music in a category like “false metal.” And yet, again, there’s nothing black about this music at all.

So I really think we ought to call this something else. Unfortunately, the appellation “white metal” has already been claimed for Christian metal- which, when it imitates black metal specifically, has been tagged with the topsy-turvy name “unblack metal.” So what do we call what Liturgy does? Gray metal? Bright metal? Perhaps, following the diction of frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, “transcendental metal.” I think here we can see how the world of black (or “black-esque”) metal and the world of NPR come to intersect: as metal critic Stefan Raduta noted last year, other bands that do this type of thing (specifically Wolves In The Throne Room) “[are] giving [black metal] back its soul, its integrity.” – Non-Alignment Pact

I forget how 20 years later, black metal is still alien to modern people. They want it to be just like rock music.

Liturgy isn’t giving black metal back its soul; as Mee admits above, it’s going in the opposite direction.

It’s putting rock soul into black metal.

Rock soul is the worksong of proles everywhere — life is bad, it ain’t my fault, let’s get drunk and screw, maybe lose ourselves in emotion, and we’ll feel it’s bigger than the whole world, until tomorrow of course when we get up and do it all again.