ALBUM REVIEW: You Could Do It Tonight – Couch Slut

April 18, 2024 Jack McGill

The following words describe an album that contains graphic themes of self-harm and violence. Reader and listener discretion is advised.

When someone recommends a band for you to listen to, and you ask “well, what sort of music is it?”, you’ll have some preconceived notions of what it will sound like when you get your answer. It’s a bit different when someone recommends you COUCH SLUT and they tell you they’re a noise rock band, because this isn’t like any noise rock you’ve heard before, they aren’t the stereotypical dudes using way too much reverb and recording out of their garage. They have a natural element of depravity that rears its head in order to translate trauma to music. It’s unmistakably terrifying, using doom-driven and revolting sounds as building blocks to create a mass that can only be seen as a mound of morbid anecdotes and tales. Their new album You Could Do It Tonight is a rare find, in the sense that something this alive doesn’t come along often.

Rancid, vile, putrid, COUCH SLUT push it all to the extreme with sludgy, grimy noise to shock the system. Tracks like Ode To Jimbo and Downhill Racer show just how technically precise the New York quintet can be, even amongst the overwhelming levels of noise, whilst still weaving in simpler narratives as to not get overshadowed by the tracks that steal the show. Downhill Racer also has one of the grottiest gutturals to be found in noise rock, surely.

The real substance and borderline disturbing content of the album you’ll find on tracks like Wilkinson’s Sword, a previous brand of choice that vocalist Megan Osztrosits would use for self-harm, while The Donkey sets industrial borders, focusing on gruesome tales of ritualistic self-mutilation and anecdotes of crazy propositions of living in either a shed or under a bridge.

Without spoiling, or going into too much detail of the unexplored tracks, the record is a reminder that it’s become much less common to release music that lets you experience somebody’s trauma, an immersive world terror, whilst not handing it over completely or simply just sharing it with you. COUCH SLUT not only entice into entering this murder house but they kick you down into the basement and lock all the doors. Not everything has a happy ending or a resolution, or it becomes an act of resistance through being shared, but this is sadistic in the pursuit of making something memorable.

Everything inside You Could Do It Tonight screams that you shouldn’t listen to it, but it’s absolutely essential that you do — if you feel prepared to do so. Become engrossed in what will be one of the most divisive records of the 2020s. Bite your tongue, maybe even clean off, swallow it, the potent dose of horror becomes grounding amongst the abundance of seemingly identical fluff that is being released currently.

Rating: 10/10