Imagine you hadn’t seen an old friend for years and suddenly, after only hearing quick bursts of what they were up to through other friends, they resurface. Naturally, you invite them out, and when you meet, you grin – because you’re quite excited and pleased to see them – and your friend smashes you over the head with a bar stool, sets fire to the curtains and leaps headfirst out of the window into traffic. Welcome to the ridiculously late Comanechi debut LP – it’s been too long in coming, it’s a ridiculously challenging listen, but it’s fucking amazing. Welcome back.

In case your screen-addled brains have forgotten the dim and distant events of 2005, Comenchi were then currently busy smashing the bricks off the walls all over London with their increasingly ferocious live shows. A boy-girl guitarist-drummer set-up with Akiko’s underwear often flashing in time to her alternatingly childlike/banshee voice attack, I often thought flames were about to start coming from their eyes, never mind the PA. Since then, Akiko was then in Pre, became a fully-fledged member of The Big Pink, and… so much for all that Comanechi fun, we thought. Nuh-uh.

Crime Of Love is, preposterously, the debut LP then, and is made up of a few oldies, but time can’t wither a noise this ferocious, and it’ll chew your hair out and still leave you smiling. From the opening thirty-second doomy squalling chaos of ‘Prologue’, to the dying droning ending of ‘R.O.M.P’, it’s a cataclysmic torrent of wide-eyed mayhem, full of challenge, from the manic ‘Rabbit Hole’ and its schizophrenic line “I want to go down the rabbit hole / I want to feel like a beautfiul girl” to ‘Naked’ and the slightly lunatic “I want to be naked / Wash my body with a toothbrush”.

Parts go doomy, parts just go squalling and savage, lots is straight-up Bikini-Kill-flavoured high velocity punk, and some of it even gets within a spasm’s distance of danceable, but its starting point is animal, visceral release, a firehose of unfettered rage, love, confusion, joy and pain. It’s a towering, towering album that’ll leave you in slightly terrified awe – and absolutely knackered. Wow.