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.”
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Nobel seemingly knew what he wanted to hear right from the outset. In 2012, he attended a show at the Brooklyn DIY space Big Snow Buffalo Lodge. On the bill was Osztrosits, performing under her former solo alias Mad O, through which she first began working out the autobiographical exorcisms that went on to fuel Couch Slut. “It was me and my keyboard, and I would go to a venue, some noise basement, or whatever, and then all the lights get shut off for 6 to 10 minutes,” she recalls of the project. “I’m playing the piano and I'm screaming in Hungarian, and it's all the same stories, but it's just in a different language because I felt like I couldn't really express that in English for anyone to really hear. The lights go back on and I'm naked and covered in blood, and there's just gashes all over my body.”
As Nobel watched the set, he had what he describes as a vision. “I remember distinctly feeling like if there was a band playing behind Megan, it would be the most powerful shit,” he recalls. “‘That's what I want to see. It's extremely important for me to make that happen.’”
When he later met Osztrosits and asked her to front the band, she was skeptical, but she came around to the idea after hearing Nobel’s early song ideas, which took cues from scuzzbucket noise-rock touchstones like Brainbombs and the Jesus Lizard. (“I was like, oh, this really normal-looking guy in a Hawaiian shirt and fucking Birkenstocks is writing this nasty Brainbombs shit that I love,” Osztrosits says.)
Amy Mills, Kevin Hall and former guitarist Kevin Wunderlich soon signed on. Hall remembers feeling an immediate spark at the band’s early practices. “My first exposure was walking into a room where Theo, Amy and Kevin Wunderlich were playing the main riff of what became one of our first songs,” he says. “It wasn’t being played with the energy or attitude that it wound up with, but the riff itself struck me as undeniably awesome and the product of a mind frighteningly well-attuned to what I wanted to hear and play.”
Mills has a clear memory of the group’s sound taking shape. “The original sonic influences that were pitched to me were noise-rock, specifically Oxbow, Jesus Lizard and AmRep bands,” she says. “The sound formed into its own thing pretty quickly, and I remember it really being a group effort and vision while we were developing those early songs.”The band then adapted its name from an Oxbow lyric off 2002’s An Evil Heat, in which vocalist Eugene Robinson plays the role of, as Nobel puts it, “a demonic preacher inviting you into sin.”
My Life as a Woman, Couch Slut’s 2014 debut, proved that Nobel’s initial hunch was correct: The combined sound of Osztrosits and a band was, in fact, the most powerful shit. On tracks like “Little Girl Things,” Nobel, Mills, Hall and Wunderlich roared like an infernal orchestra, as Osztrosits’ screams conveyed some unholy cocktail of rage and pain, while elsewhere, elegiac clean-toned guitars and writhing baritone saxophone indicated that the project — informed from the outset by Nobel’s love of everything from classical music and grunge to primitive black metal and ornate prog — would never be bound by simplistic genre boundaries.
Contempt, released in 2017, dialed up both the brutality and the bleak beauty, while 2020’s Take a Chance on Rock ’n’ Roll capitalized on the seedier implications of its title — drawn from a line in the care-free 1978 Boston anthem “Feelin’ Satisfied” — finding a rollicking groove that created a queasy tension with the dire and often graphic scenarios explored in the lyrics.
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You Could Do It Tonight — the title a mondegreen also sourced from “Feelin’ Satisfied” — feels like both a summation and an expansion of the Couch Slut experience to date. On one hand, the album features some of the band’s most straightforward noise-rock crushers to date. A prime example: “Ode to Jimbo,” which pairs a stomping central riff with lyrics about sloppy-drunk excess, set in Osztrosits’ favorite Brooklyn watering hole, Jimbo Slim’s. “‘Ode to Jimbo’ is the first, like, love song that we’ve ever done, and I did that for my friend's bar that I go to every day,” she explains. (One of her fellow Jimbo’s regulars, Joseph Bone, an elusive septuagenarian filmmaker, cameos on “Presidential Welcome,” a brilliantly bizarre mid-album spoken-word interlude that sets his weathered croak against what is essentially a notated chamber-music piece featuring Mills on trumpet and piano by Steve Blanco, bassist of Couch Slut compatriots and tourmates Imperial Triumphant.)
If a track like “Ode to Jimbo” feels like home base for Couch Slut, near-seven-minute album closer “The Weaversville Home for Boys” is, as Nobel notes, “probably one of our longest, most outlandish compositions.” Based around real-life experiences Osztrosits and her friends had growing up in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, getting high in abandoned buildings also frequented by, in her words, “all kinds of goth kids doing satanic cult shit,” the song feels like an urban legend come to life. Over a throbbing bass-and-drums pulse, Osztrosits and another Jimbo’s regular, Lyv Giordano, tell the story of a local boys’ home where a grisly breakout was said to have occurred, and, later, an unnerving encounter with the escapees. Starting out minimal and throbbing, the song morphs into a kind of black-metal-gone-prog, spotlighting the intricately braided guitars of Mills and DiLella.
The song’s final narrative twist is a ghost-story-like embellishment, which felt like a revelation for Nobel and Osztrosits, who have previously based much of their lyrical content solely on the vocalist’s actual experiences. “We've never done anything like that, and that was a turning point for me,” Osztrosits says. “I was like, oh, shit, you could just write anything — it doesn't have to be true stories.”
That said, some of the stories here are true, and they’re particularly unsavory. Osztrosits sardonically labels “Wilkinson’s Sword” the “self-harm anthem of the year.” She explains that the namesake item is “a brand of straight razors that I would use to slice my body all up — easiest cleanup, as far as taping your skin back together, very sharp.” She adds, “I started first cutting myself when I was 11, and that song is about, now I'm older, and I discover scalpels and actual razors, and I'm like, holy shit, this is a total game changer for me.” The song’s midsection, where the band alternates between huge, flailing power chords and precision melodic riffing, complete with rumbling double kick drum, handily demonstrates the musical range Couch Slut have honed during the past decade.
The slow, unforgiving “Laughing and Crying” weaves together a fictional scenario of a home invasion on Christmas Eve — listen closely and you’ll hear sleigh bells keeping time midway through — and a real-life incident in which Nobel fell victim to an in-home robbery while traveling in Argentina with friends after college. “I saw a guy pointing a gun at my buddy and restraining him, and there was a knife in my throat,” Nobel recalls. “They tied us up, and I was marched down the stairs where everyone else was also tied up. And I remember when they left, I was really happy that the ordeal was over. I started laughing when it was done.”
Nobel says he also laughed the first time he read an Osztrosits-penned couplet in “Ode to Jimbo”: “You always know when it’s time to leave / I know all the best places to heave.” (“You thought that was very stupid,” Osztrosits teases. “No, I thought that was hysterical,” Nobel insists.) He contrasts that with his initial reaction to a line in “Couch Slut Lewis.” At one point in the song, narrating from the perspective of a woman on tour witnessing an assault at a DIY venue , Osztrosits howls, “I’m coming home, mom.” Nobel had briefly left the studio while Osztrosits was recording her vocals for the track. When he returned and heard this section, he says, “I started sobbing. I got so emotional that I had to leave the studio. There was something about Megan delivering that line that just overwhelmed me.”
The band reflects on how, 10 years and now four albums in, Couch Slut have retained their core extremity but also widened their scope to accommodate a broader range of emotion and sonic texture. “This is our most musically dense and complex work by far,” Hall says. “The diversity of the sound between all the different tracks on the album is what makes this one unique,” DiLella adds. “I don't know that there are even two tracks on this one that you could say have a lot of overlap stylistically or structurally.” In Mills’ view, “The biggest step forward I see is that this record really doesn’t sound like anything else out there, which is always something to strive for and something I value in other bands.”
So on You Could Do It Tonight, in addition to what Osztrosits calls the band’s track record of serving up “song after song of depravity and brutality,” we also get an enigmatic interlude, a spooky ghost story and maybe a sick joke or two. “It made me laugh, and it made me cry,” Nobel says, aptly characterizing the totality of the album. “It’s everything.”