Bruise Bath answer the news with the single Non-Consensual Intervention

Bruise Bath have released Non-Consensual Intervention, a bass-forward protest song that arrived on Monday afternoon with no album attached to it. The Philadelphia band already put out a self-titled record this year, their second eponymous album rather than their first, and this is the evidence that they were not finished with the year.

The track opens with a sampled piece of spoken word arguing that the United States should be invaded one day so that Americans might understand what that feels like. The riff that follows chews on the same idea rather than moving past it, which is a structural choice as much as a political one: the sample sets the terms and the band refuses to change the subject.

Partway through, the arrangement clears out and leaves a guttural wail asking how anyone is supposed to live. Stereogum, which posted the song, heard the whole thing as discordant lo-fi horror, and the band's own name has rarely been a better description of what it sounds like.

Protest songs in heavy music usually work by volume. This one works by repetition, holding a single argument long enough that the listener has to either agree with it or leave, and the lo-fi recording keeps the sampled voice at the same level as the guitars instead of dropping it underneath them.

Bruise Bath belong to a small stretch of American heavy music that has been unusually productive this year, a group that also takes in the noise sludge band Chat Pile and the reactivated Acid Bath, who brought sludge metal back to New York this summer. None of them is signed to a major and all of them are releasing on their own timetable.

Nothing in the report ties the song to an EP, an album or a tour, so it stands on its own for now. Any follow-up will appear on the release calendar with the rest of the metal schedule.