What does it even mean to be a rock and roll band in 2018? There’s more than one answer, of course, some more satisfactory than others. If you’re in Greta Van Fleet, you may understand your charge to be equal parts torch-bearing and opportunism, exploiting Led Zeppelin cosplay to preserve in amber a particular lineage, with any luck seducing Spotify’s rock algorithms along the way. If you’re one of the Twenty One Pilots, meanwhile, you may feel unencumbered to renegotiate what rock even means as a taxonomy— or at least a marketing term— while betraying tenuous allegiance to its tropes and traditions. Iceage has the best idea of all: reassembling rock’s most familiar building blocks in a way that’s bracingly anarchic and unpredictable. That’s the highest praise imaginable for an album like Beyondless, which crackles with majesty and menace: It makes rock and roll sound dangerous again, using time-tested motifs and ideas to create the illusion you’ve never heard anything quite like it.

You can discuss the album through a list of its influences, but it wouldn’t quite convey the record’s exhilaratingly off-balance equilibrium— how it sounds sure-footed and lawless, swaggering and implosive. By all means, talk about how the group borrows from Johnny Thunders’ arsenal of buzz saw guitar riffs and chattering sound effects— but also be sure to mention the queasy cabaret number “Showtime,” where they zero in on the quality that truly made the New York Dolls dangerous and ahead of their time—how they took trashy theatricality dead-seriously, their lack of irony dogged and demented. You can also discuss Iceage’s deployment of acoustic flourishes on “Under the Sun,” but only if you note how their spindly folk always sounds sinister and alienating; when they go rustic, it’s not to conjure the comforts of home, but the hard-boiled torment of a murder ballad. Like any good rock record, you can also describe this one by enumerating its forms of movement: “Hurrah” is a bruiser right out of the gate, hurtling forward with waves of tremulous bass and a distorted Chess Records riff, while “Thieves Like Us” patiently builds from a country shuffle into a howling boogie. “Catch It” is thunderous and slow, but “Pain Killer” almost qualifies as an anthem, buoyant horns lifting it out of its Exile on Main Street murk. Consider it an argument for one of rock’s most enduring value propositions: Transcendence through trash; uplifting primitivism.

Seedy and literate in equal measure, the songs on Beyondless find their perfect narrator in Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, who slurs his way through tales of decay and debauchery, filtered through skewed poetry. Never exactly aloof but also not as alarmed as you think he should be, Rønnenfelt is a kind of bemused oracle; the world is burning, but at least it makes for a crackling good yarn. He waxes apocalyptic on “The Day the Music Dies,” which rattles and hums with bad omens, and on “Hurrah,” he channels a soldier intoxicated with bloodlust. It’s a song about state-sanctioned violence, told in a language any plutocrat could understand—the language of capitalism! (“I was told to protect and serve/ But I’m here to supply a demand,” he grins.) What gives these signs o’ the times such intrigue is that, as he drifts through crumbling streets, Rønnenfelt can’t shake the corrosion in his own soul—what Richard Thompson might call “the rattle within.” On “Plead the Fifth,” he’s racked by guilt: “Unravel and come undone/ plead the fifth on all accounts.” On “Beyondless,” he’s a faithless lover, borrowing his half-hearted apology from a Dylan classic: “If you think I am the pillar which you needed/ Believe me, dearest, it ain’t me.” These songs are unsentimental and unflinching, but also invigorating; from the abattoir of Rønnenfelt’s imagination blooms a florid storytelling, equal parts Tom Waits impressionism and midnight-black Nick Cave comedy. The best yarn here is “Thieves Like Us,” which begins with Rønnenfelt filing a restraining order—“on humanity or myself.” It’s a fine line between misanthropy and self-loathing, and the song only ratchets up the urgency from there, both in its feverish narration and its locomotive rhythm. “Hush as I spill my wayward theory,” Rønnenfelt sings, the barstool philosopher calling his grotesque salon to attention. He’s not the first to tell this tale, but you’ll hardly remember when you’ve heard it told with such panache.