ALBUM REVIEW: Couch Slut – ‘You Could Do It Tonight’

Noise music is an uncaged animal. Like watching a gnarly all-too-real nature documentary that’s all bite, bark and blood, its most visceral side can be a challenge even if the songs do bop hard. Both make up Couch Slut’s mantra: rollicking, rhythmic headbangers that underpin stomach churning tales of debauchery. And in their case, the depraved lyrical content stretches beyond B-movie fantasia into genuinely troubling real-life waters.

The Brooklyn group was, after all, formed out of Amy Mills’ abrasive guitars and distorted trumpets, and Theo Nobel’s thudding drums, adding performative crowd-terrifier Megan Osztrosits to the mix. While Kevin Hall’s bass acts as a musical runaway train chugging then disappearing off the tracks, Osztrosits prowls among or on the sidelines of stage onlookers, rasping through psychological horrors made all the more uncomfortable in their trueness. It’s a hallmark that has marked out Couch Slut’s uniquely unnerving persona since breakouts My Life As A Woman and Contempt, and still comes in droves on the fantastically ambiguous You Could Do It Tonight.

As earlier recordings captured their loose sessions in echoey spaces, since the excellent Take Your Chance On Rock ‘N’ Roll the disparate sonic shrieks are better distilled to maximum effect. Couch Slut Lewis immediately locks into a groove only to get completely fucked by jaunty-cum-swampy guitars. Laughing And Crying is suitably jarring with the instrumentals following their own paths. Downhill Racer features a nifty mid-section drum pattern before becoming near unlistenable in its squelched denouement (featuring a demon voice!). Those once duelling, once connecting guitars cover themselves in black metal stylings to govern Energy Crystals For Healing, but somehow manage to seek out a happier sounding riff on claustrophobic closer The Weaversville Home For Boys as if for a laugh. It would be funny if not for the story it underpins.

Death metal or grindcore’s twisted, macabre lyrics may be too disconcerting to all those who can’t handle any inch of parody, but Osztrosits takes the biscuit for making album experiences truly unpleasant, the vocal equivalent of the series of grey-and-black album covers that thread together their series of violent musical demonstrations. The last track features friend Lyv Giordano’s descriptions of a facility frequented by occultists. Laughing And Crying, like a companion piece to the horrific abduction tale Someplace Cheap, depicts Nobel’s own story of being held at knifepoint at a house in Argentina and links it to a fictional Christmas Eve tragedy. The scrapes they find themselves in are numerous, something they do acknowledge with a wink—“I was preparing for what already happened, and when it happened, I was well rehearsed”—and the multiple self-referential jokes shows it’s not all completely twisted. 

The narrated cartoonish dread of The Donkey feels particularly apt to be taken with a pinch of salt. After the characters are fired from a haunted waterpark, they make a claymation film strung out on drugs, and the references to a chaotic friend’s grandfather’s shed in Nazareth being told like a WhatsApp voice note makes the sublime and ridiculous seem normal. Ode To Jimbo is a celebration of the band’s local boozer too, the sort of after hours dive you find yourself in at gods-know-when surrounded by gods-know-who. Even regular barfly Joseph Bone narrates Presidential Welcome accompanied by Mills’ trumpet and a piano piece from Imperial Triumphant’s Steve Blanco. The Brooklyn scene is tight, and it’s a rare occasion of Couch Slut lovingly nodding to their artistic hotbed homeland in their own strange way.

That single ultimately mimics the anxiety of a shocking hangover over a toilet bowl, and, to be honest, there’s hardly a relenting moment away from that feeling. It’s what we’ve come to expect in the decade-long career of Couch Slut, upping the misery and ugliness that any abrasive music intends to deliver in bucketloads. But it’s hypnotic rhythmic pummeling, stylish flair, a few waltzing triplets, and heart-on-sleeve graphic nature are unflappable. When you’re in the mindset of craving the dour, the throttling, and the unsettling, put it on. It’ll just about haunt the rest of your 2024, just how we like it.

For fans of: Pissed Jeans, Chat Pile, Gouge Away

‘You Could Do It Tonight’ by Couch Slut is released on 19th April on Brutal Panda Records.

Words by Elliot Burr