A home invasion on Christmas Eve, an impromptu film shoot turned terrifying bloodbath, an assault on an unconscious woman at a local music venue, a killing spree at a home for disturbed boys — these are just a few of the scenarios you’ll encounter on You Could Do It Tonight, the latest aural horror show from New York’s Couch Slut.

If this album — the band’s fourth LP — marks your first encounter with the band, I both envy you and feel a certain degree of sympathy. The former because Couch Slut are a revelation, easily one of the most bracing new additions to the landscape of extreme music during the past decade. The latter because they’re also something of an ordeal, the kind of band that inflicts its music as much as performs it. 

Consider You Could Do It Tonight standout “The Donkey.” Here, Kevin Hall’s bass and Theo Nobel’s drums stagger forward in a lurching waltz, as the guitars of Amy Mills and Dylan DiLella alternately lock in with the rhythm section, or trade sickly melodies and scribbles of aural interference. Meanwhile, Megan Osztrosits is your master of ceremonies, recounting a real-life tale of the time she and some former co-workers “took drugs and decided to make a stop-motion animation film,” starring a pair of dolls placed in compromising positions. She narrates the events almost matter-of-factly but punctuates the increasingly distressing narrative with convulsive, corrosive screams. The song’s see-saw of tension and release creates a sense of mounting dread, like riding a slow conveyor belt toward some terrible fate.

Even if you’re familiar with Couch Slut, and the scorched-earth vignettes of trauma and degradation that fill their back catalog, a track like this still has the power to transfix and distress. The same goes for other You Could Do It Tonight highlights such as “Energy Crystals for Healing” — which combines the band’s signature downtempo bludgeon with ominously majestic riffs that evoke the punkier wing of black metal and references to a “crushed cock in a tiny wire cage” — or “Wilkinson’s Sword,” with its mournful post-punk overtones and unsettling allusions to self-harm.

“My job is to start with something ugly and then make it uglier,” says Nobel, the band’s chief songwriter, reflecting on the band’s relentless drive toward new varieties of harrowing intensity, undiminished around 10 years into Couch Slut’s lifespan. “But when I'm writing the stuff, I find that's easy to do because what I'm actually doing is just trying to make it sound more interesting to me. It's not like, OK, I'm sitting down and trying to do something vicious. It's just what I want to hear.”