Model/Actriz began in a Boston basement, with Cole Haden thrashing through what he called “my 19-year-old answer to whatever I could muster up as a Laurie Anderson-type electronic opera” and two hypnotized audience members, Ruben Radlauer and Jack Wetmore, sending him some voice memos and asking to collaborate. After writing two songs together, they abruptly decided the time was ripe for a California tour.  Together, they and bassist Aaron Shapiro are lifelong members of the Church of the Too Much, which is forever accepting new congregants; Haden has intricate theories on the “sexual vigor and terror” of the Broadway show Cats, which he proclaims has “infiltrated everything I’ve ever made.”

The band’s devotion courses through every serrated second of “Amaranth,” a riot of jackhammering percussion and heavy-breathing vocals that pinpoints the uneasy nexus where arousal becomes indistinguishable from indigestion. The spoken-sung vocals and driving dance-punk grooves might recall LCD Soundsystem, but “Amaranth” plays out in darker environs—malfunctioning strobes, low ceilings, sour air. “I want to see the surface of the water bend/See it cave in diving over me,” Haden trembles: Euphoria, in this place, feels interchangeable with annihilation, and one keeps shading into the other under the flickering lights.