Imagine, if you will, a typical home speaker. Now, subtract all the frills and details that come to mind—like logos, raised edges, and glowing lights—and you’ve arrived at something akin to the first prototype of the new Monolith Aluminum.

The speaker, designed by the Swedish studio Nocs Design, is the second iteration of the original plywood-based Monolith. While the first Monolith speaker featured a minimal design, with just five speakers mounted into a matte black box, the Monolith Aluminum takes simplicity to another level. Crafted out of recycled aluminum billets, the new speaker is a smooth, ultra-skinny slab that’s small enough to fit in a purse—and notably, it’s devoid of the plastic that most other speakers require. Five circular clusters of holes are the only real indicator of the object’s function.

“I wanted to bring all the know-how and performance down to a more compact format,” says Nocs’ head of design Daniel Alm. “We learned a lot from the original Monolith. Also, I had an urge to be able to keep a consistency in the manufacturing—machining, anodizing, and sandblasting allows that to a greater extent than plywood. It’s kind of an obsession to deliver a perfect product for our customers.”

According to Alm, one of the advantages of being a small player in the industry is the ability to aim for perfection with the finishes on every product. For the Monolith Aluminum, he had two main goals in mind for the final design: timelessness and sustainability.

To achieve both of those ends, Alm’s production team started by removing all plastic from the equation. A preprogramed machine used rotating cutting tools to carve each aluminum billet into the desired shape, which required multiple passes to ensure accuracy down to the micrometer. On the inside of the speaker, five compact divers and a printed circuit board (PCB) were mounted using screws rather than glue. Then, the metal was anodized and sandblasted to achieve its final texture: “Not as smooth as Apple,” Alm says, adding that “we like the surface to be a little bit more rough.” The result looks more like an avant-garde sculpture than a consumer electronic.

Both iterations of the Monolith speaker are engineered to allow customers to disassemble them and replace any of their internal parts, extending their lifespans as much as possible. Ultimately, the entirety of the Monolith Aluminum can be recycled.

“For me, the most important thing is that this stands the test of time,” Alm says. “I want people to be able to replace the drivers if needed, replace the PCB, so that it lasts longer than the regular kind of consumer electronic stuff that you buy and then scrap and throw away.”

The Monolith Aluminum is currently available for preorder in black or silver. It costs $1,000 and is expected to ship out sometime in January.