It’s not uncommon for musicians to use something — beers, booze, drug binges — to take the edge off before a performance. Those vices are well and good for Couch Slut’s Megan Osztrosits, but she prefers the all-encompassing numbness that only self-inflicted head trauma can provide. For her, this usually takes the form of repeatedly bashing herself in the skull with her microphone until blood drips down her face. “From the first note, I’m blacking out and going somewhere else,” she explained during our conversation at Roadburn, an annual festival celebrating heavy music in Tilburg, a Dutch city best known for its university and a beautifully weird Brothers Grimm-based amusement park. “It’s out of body.”

The band was at the festival to play their fourth album, You Could Do It Tonight. Osztrosits’ need to dull the senses with blunt force to the cranium makes more sense the more closely you read the album’s nightmarish lyrics, filled with details of nihilistic violence and self-destruction too shocking to be fabricated. There are harrowing tales of self-mutilation in church and stealing disposable scalpels from the doctor’s office, and that’s just track three. For the other members of Couch Slut — bassist and keyboardist Kevin Hall, guitarist and trumpeter Amy Mills, percussionist Theo Nobel, and guitarist Dylan DiLella — performing live is a much more embodied experience. “We have to pay attention with the new stuff,” Hall said of the acrobatic time signature changes and towering solos on You Could Do It Tonight. “It’s too difficult not to.”

By the time I arrived at Couch Slut’s secret show at Tilburg’s Ladybird Skatepark later that night, Osztrosits was already bleeding profusely — into her hair, onto the microphone, pooling with sweat and spilled beer on the tarp below her. The following day’s official show would be a full playthrough of their new album, so the Friday show was something of a greatest hits set. As Mills shredded behind her on a baby pink Hello Kitty Squire, Osztrosits screamed lyrics from the band’s 2017 album Contempt at the top of her lungs, eyes wild: “Dressed like that at a funeral? You’re gonna give someone the wrong idea!”

A crowd had formed around Osztrosits, supplying her with half-drunk beer cans. Like any typical Couch Slut show, she spent most of the show enmeshed in the audience, daring them to get a good look, close up, at her blood-caked face. Unlike the other Couch Slut shows I had seen in Brooklyn, the band’s home base, there was a line that spilled out of the door and onto the block to get in. Roadburn had that kind of effect: Bands that typically booked 200-capacity venues (prayer circle for Greenpoint’s metal haven Saint Vitus) back in the United States filled cavernous industrial spaces with hundreds more waiting patiently to get inside. Random strangers I met at bars — a drunken Swede, a trio of friendly Brits — were just as enthusiastic about acts like New Jersey doom metal outfit Sunrot or California experimental black metal group Agriculture as they were for legendary drone supergroups like Khanate.

Case in point, there was a lengthy queue to get into Couch Slut’s 2PM album release show the next day at Koepelhal, a massive warehouse in the center of the city. “Welcome to the Couch Slut brunch hour!” Osztrosits joked before the band launched into their new material. You Could Do It Tonight sets its scenery slowly, the opening guitar squeal giving way to a lurching bassline; even before Osztrosits says a word, a creeping dread sets in. In the world of Couch Slut, good deeds don’t just go unpunished — they haunt the future like hexes or open wounds. On “Couch Slut Lewis,” that dread takes the form of a road story that simmers its horror slowly, in which Osztrosits tries in good faith to check in on a woman clearly in distress and see if she knows the people around her, only to be told, in so many words, to fuck off: “I was raped last week in my car/ Who gives a fuck who they are?”

There are moments of relative levity: Take “Ode To Jimbo,” an homage to Brooklyn watering hole Jimbo Slims that ends with Osztrosits puking and barely making it home in one piece (Jimbo regulars feature across the album, from backing vocals to the stately voice reciting the “Presidential Welcome” to its B-side). But across the album, Couch Slut lean into the darkness: satanic rituals, kidnappings, genitals stuffed inside metal cages. Saturday’s crowd ate up every word, cheering for an album that had just come out in a language many barely spoke — and that was before they introduced a special guest, Imperial Triumphant’s Steve Blanco, to join them for the second half of their performance.

It felt like a high watermark for a band that struggled to find a home in New York’s heavy music scene. “It’s easy to feel like black sheep playing this kind of music,” said DiLella, who also plays in Brooklyn experimental metal group Pyrrhon. Nobel added, “If we’re embraced by something like a community, it’s the community that’s on the fringe of extreme, interesting metal music.” Not solely noise music, nor defined easily by the punk or metal scenes in and around New York, which tend towards metalcore and hardcore, Couch Slut was created in part to carve out a new sound that its members thought was missing from heavy music. The band began in 2013 when Nobel asked Mills if she wanted to start a noise rock band. “I just had a lot of music that I wanted to make,” he explained. Mills previously performed horns and vocals in the industrial black metal band Epistasis, and Nobel thought her combination of shredded screams and trumpet blasts might fit his vision. The rest of the band assembled through shared taste: “Megan, Kevin, Amy and I were friends, just sitting around talking about the Jesus Lizard or Cherubs,” Nobel remembered.

For their first two records, Mills and former bandmate Kevin Wunderlich handled recording duties. But for 2020’s Take A Chance On Rock And Roll and their most recent record, they partnered with Uniform’s Ben Greenberg. “On My Life As A Woman and Contempt, we would just obsess over every little thing,” Nobel said. “It’s good to relinquish control to someone else,” Mills added. With production duties handled, the band focused on more ambitious compositions, with Nobel notating the music and the others interpreting it: When Nobel suggested a particularly difficult guitar part, Mills “figured out alternative tunings that allowed me to de-barre a lot of the weird chords and made it a lot easier to play.” The result is an album that finds new ways to shock with its instrumentation as much as its lyrics. During the pandemic, Hall picked up a shenhai, a double-reeded Indian wind instrument, after he learned that Captain Beefheart used the same instrument on his 1971 record Mirror Man. It appears on “Ode To Jimbo” alongside Mills’ trumpet to create a competing cacophony of chaos too strange to parse before it passes.

At its core, attending a Couch Slut show is not dissimilar from watching a particularly twisted standup routine. The lyrics come from Osztrosits’ real life, based on stories she tells at Jimbo’s until Nobel suggests she turn them into songs. “I think those stories are funny,” she explained. “Not a lot of people take the humor away. Maybe you hear this and think ‘Oh, that’s horrifying.’ Maybe it is. But the thing that comes after fear is resignation, and then you can laugh at the fact that you’re still alive.”

Bending her words to fit the band’s musical cadences, she is half carnival barker, half cautionary tale: Step right up and hear what happened when Osztrosits and her friends got fired from the haunted waterpark! (It involves drugs, of course, and a stop motion animation film gone horribly wrong.) “When your inhibitions are non-existent, you open the door to dangerous situations,” Osztrosits said of the checkered past she screams about on their new record. On “The Weaversville Home For Boys,” based on a real juvenile detention center, Osztrosits steps up her role as narrator of the dark side, pointing out the abandoned grounds on what sounds like a casual car ride. “We took this urban legend that existed in the area,” she said of the Pennsylvania facility. “We would drive around that area and get high. Satanists and all kinds of weird people would hang around on Halloween. We just put all that lore together. I really, really enjoyed the way that turned out.”

Though she sings about uniquely female terrors — from daily objectification to explicit depictions of sexual and physical exploitation — the audience at Roadburn was largely made up of men. It reminded me of something Osztrosits said earlier that day, about the relief she felt encountering a band with even one other woman on tour: “I immediately hugged her, like, ‘This is so cool. Can we put makeup on each other?'” Mills similarly expressed hope that there would be more trans women in the heavy music world in the future, a vision partly realized when she met up with Agriculture’s Leah Levinson, Teeth Dreams’ Violet Aisling, and Uboa’s Xandra Metcalfe at the festival. Even if the crowds at Roadburn still felt dominated by dudes, its lineup was an optimistic step towards something like gender parity in metal.

Couch Slut isn’t exactly music created to uplift, but the band sees its heaviness as a kind of bloodletting. “I hope it makes people feel joyful through catharsis,” Mills added. “I saw Thantifaxath last night and it was the happiest I had been in a long time, and that’s some of the weirdest, most fucked up sounding music ever. Something about dissonance has always made me excited.” DiLella agreed: “There’s something ecstatic about this kind of music.” As someone who’s seen the band live half a dozen times over the past six years, I can attest to that palliative quality: Watching Osztrosits physically manifest her trauma through screams and shouts and blood feels like a cold plunge, shocking and invigorating all at once. Or, as she put it, “If you want to stand there and watch somebody essentially have a nervous breakdown, maybe that says something more about you than me.”

Is there ever any concern that Osztrosits will one day run out of tales of personal debasement? “My life has chilled out a lot. I value rest,” Osztrosits acknowledged. But then, she added, “I am still doing drugs. There’s still weird shit happening.” Later that weekend, I ran into Osztrosits in line for another show at the skatepark, a surprise Neil Young cover set from Inter Arma. I joined the conversation with two other festival goers, who reiterated a Roadburn housing hack I’d heard a few times by this point (instead of paying premiums for the Holiday Inn, many attendees stay at a nearby safari park and catch a bus in after waking up to the sound of wild jaguars). Soon, though, Osztrosits naturally fell into the role of storyteller, detailing a night in Minneapolis that involved hitching a ride back with two strange men and using a combination of her fingernails and a lit joint as protection against potential foul play. After the story, as we stood there mouths agape, Osztrosits seemed to express what we were all thinking: “I should probably save this for a song.”

You Could Do It Tonight is out now on Brutal Panda.