The Catheters are a scourge on pretty boy rock ‘n’ roll, a festering wound in the ear of all things delicate, a hot razor blade slashing through tight knots of control. This is the band you listen to when your girlfriend leaves you cold, when you get tired of your boss using your spine as his sidewalk, when you want to put a fist through a wall. You grew up on the Germs and The Pagans, took a left turn into Pere Ubu, Electric Eels, and Pussy Galore, and injected ‘60s garage-psyche like The Yardbirds, Blue Cheer, and Love into your veins at a young age. The Catheters are your catharsis for maniacal living. So when frontman Brain Standeford screams, “I've been tied to the eyes of confusion,” on the new album’s “Red Flags to White,” he sings it with that sweat-drenched, red-eyed resolution you understand.

If you listened to the band’s last tumultuous release, 2002’s Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days, you know the Catheters don’t play the kinda music for gazing at your Converse. This is the band that jolted the British and American press to attention with Static…, the boys that rocked London’s sold-out Electric Ballroom with Mudhoney on a tour through the UK when only half the Catheters were of drinking age. In the last couple of years, they’ve also shared stages with such critical darlings as Burning Brides, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Federation X, and Division of Laura Lee, among others.

Howling… is the Seattle band’s third full-length of pent-up brawlers, and they’re still radiating the same dark, perilous edge — working once again with respected producer John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Unwound, Blonde Redhead) — only now they’ve coaxed out new textures to coarsen the mix. There’s the guitar groove snaking into “Ravenous Animal,” the squalls of noise rock experimentation on “Between the Creases” and “Reaction,” and Standeford’s trademark alleycat howl, the fourth weapon in the Catheters’ arsenal. “It’s delivery rather than singing,” says Standeford, a frontman known for morphing into a human projectile during the band’s live shows. “You lend emotion to the song and your voice becomes more of an instrument.”

A sonically matured album that refuses to relinquish its venom, Howling…It Grows and Grows!!! offers snatches of archetypal imagery jutting out from Standeford’s delivery. Together his lyrics form a disheveled composite of struggle against the elements — stolen breaths, foaming mouths, and primal distractions compete for attention in these songs — while the basslines shake like low-flying bombers, the drums rattle your core and the guitars grow claws that could scratch glass. Howling… is alive, feral and twitching with energy.