The big bang. The profound statement of youth. Year zero. Perfect Pussy’s demo cassette was set-up as such, its four-song blast overflowing with visceral thrift and next-level histrionics. The songs were as much anthems as tantrums, as life-affirming as they were nihilistic hardcore traumas. You can have it all. When Perfect Pussy played at a dive in Columbus late last year, it was hard to distinguish their energy from hardcore’s underprivileged fury. In a searing 12-minute set, it was youth gone wild.

Fast-forward four months filled with unrelenting hype, not to mention an Esquire “How to Survive on Tour” think piece, and you could start to see the cracks. That kind of feeling is hard to summon night after night. Eventually the artists are warring onstage and humility is erased, but it’s still furious nonetheless. The passion becomes the craft. An unrelenting tour will do that to a buzz band.

My third time seeing Perfect Pussy, everything’s in place: the attitude’s been adjusted, the sonics have become a perfect cloud of chaos and emotion, and it’s impossible not to sink into their landslide. Let’s just suppose that what Perfect Pussy does, both onstage and on their first official statement, Say Yes to Love (Captured Tracks), is not anger amplified and manifested. It’s quite the opposite, nearly cuddly. It’s also not calculated and cold, but loose and endearing. That dichotomy between veneer and bare emotion is what sets them apart, what posits them in lofty genre-breaking accolades.

Say Yes to Love is not an album, unless the conventions of an album have changed. Of its 23 minutes, 10 are filled with lazy ambiance or field recordings of an accidental dial of a club emptied after the band torched the audience. In context, though, the dead space works. It’s in essence a forced mediation, with the first half being a veritable revelation of burning star cores and Meredith Grave’s slam-book rants calling more for a new bohemian understanding than it does for rebellion. Scorned and unnerved, Perfect Pussy don’t spit, instead they (somewhat) intellectually dissect hardcore, taking the essence and layering it with a disorienting haze of guitars feeding back and knobs twisitng to emit squeals and white noise. Bias aside, half of what Perfect Pussy do was perfected by defunct Columbus trio Lambsbread, and their nihilistic glee is one part Times New Viking, one part Melt Bannana. That’s all well and good, because songs like “Driver” and “Bells” continue to inspire moments after they fizzle out, obliterating any influence or borrowed character. “Interference Fits” arrives as the centerpiece eight minutes in and shows the slacked beauty that’s only been scratched previously. It’s a turn that shows they know there’s life after the Spin party and they’ll need to fill a space that, for now, they’ve only filled for the course of a PBR Tallboy. Maybe the concept of this record as an album lies in the constant replacing of the needle over those blown-out minutes till it adjusts to AOR constraints.