The Nashville power trio Yautja have a guttural, nasty take on metal. They play with the speed and ferocity of a hardcore band, but their riffs have sludge all over them, and their vocals are pure swamp-monster shit. In their hammering onslaught, you can hear echoes of early Mastodon, and that’s high praise. The three members of the band are all busy people, and they’ve played in bands like Thou, Coliseum, and Mutilation Rites. Singer/guitarist Shelby Poole also plays drums in the hardcore band Thirdface, who just released a motherfucker of a debut album earlier this month. And now Yautja have unveiled plans to come back with an album of their own.

It’s been seven years since Yautja released their last full-length LP, the ripshit debut Songs Of Descent. Instead of focusing on albums, Yautja have cranked out a whole lot of smaller records; they just came out with a split with the Nepalese grindcore band Chepang this past January. This spring, though, Yautja will return at full strength with the new album The Lurch, which they recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studios in Chicago. The band came out with the LP’s first single, and it’s a heavy one.

The new track “Tethered” is a brutal, elementally satisfying piledriver of a song. It’s the kind of music that can only happen when three people are in a room together and when all of them are playing as loud as possible. The video is all low-res footage of the band members horsing around together. Check out the song and the new album’s tracklist below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “A Killing Joke”
02 “The Spectacle”
03 “Wired Depths”
04 “Undesirables”
05 “Tethered”
06 “Clock Cleaner”
07 “Catastrophic”
08 “The Weight”
“Before The Foal”

The Lurch is out 5/21 on Relapse.