The debut album from one of London’s most uncompromising prospects magnificently concentrates their visceral live chaos.

As the name only begins to suggest, My Pussy Tastes Like Microplastics are one of the most uncompromising new bands out there right now. The project pulls from a diverse range of influences – among the most prominent are The Fall, Country Teasers, Throbbing Gristle – but these show up more as a philosophy than as sonic quotations. Musically, the band produce something uniquely their own, a quality augmented by a lineup that sprawls from more conventional rock band instrumentation to cello, mandola, synth pipe and unspecified percussive scrap metal.

These tunes can come out very differently live depending on factors like who is playing for the band that night (performer numbers can range from five to eight members depending on who’s free for the gig) and how patient the sound tech is feeling. For the fan of the live show, it is interesting to hear the definitive version of all this in recorded form. And certainly there is a wholeness here that draws out the unifying coherence of the whole project. Producer Armando González Sosto plays a big role in that, recording the band as live but capturing the nuances of cello melody, fragmented vocal and the swirl of metallic percussion (particularly hypnotic on ‘No More Dying’). Indeed, while this is first and foremost a punk record that insists on idiosyncrasy, DIY accessibility and elemental simplicity, there is a certain grandeur that carries through from the opening instrumental lurch of ‘Sod in Heaven’ to the relentless closer ‘Arabic Umlaut’.

This grand quality is foregrounded most explicitly on the middle sequence of the record, where the screaming chaos quietens. Here, an uneasy kind of beauty emerges. ‘Plastic Princess’ sets a suburban market for sex dolls against the brackish beauty of the landscapes of Kent, composed in tribute to Derek Jarman. ‘Wound Nurse’ speaks of “the beauty of the wound” as patient addresses nurse, the insistent repetitious phrasings suggesting the loving monotony of care. On ‘The Swollen Promise’, the eight members rise and fall as one over a repeated crescendo of impossible momentum. This is the hard fight for a new kind of beauty, the search for something liberated from the dirtied abstractions of the North Atlantic, the billboard for a kind of scrapheap utopia. It is this enterprise more than anything else which forms the continuity into the slow yaw at the centre of this record and out the other side. Closing the album out, that familiar pummelling rage is reasserted, the twin engine driving toward this heavy peace.