In the 18 months since Savages formed— three friends, plus a brutal drummer unearthed via recommendations— they’ve executed their music, shows, and business with ruthless efficiency. In one of their declarative mission statements, which appear online and are appended to their releases, they call the band a “self-affirming voice to help experience our girlfriends, our husbands, our jobs, our erotic life, and the place music occupies in our lives differently.”

Their stealthy music takes influence from post-punk’s aerodynamics, hardcore’s abrasion, and the overdriven plundering of metal, with songs rewritten until they’re reduced to the most essential ideas. And at the quartet's uncompromising heart is a vitriolic refusal of victimization, though they shrug off potential affiliations with riot grrrl, or the dogmatic approach of a band like Fugazi. Instead, their strident lyrics about embracing your creative and erotic pleasures eschew soapboxing in favor of something more instinctive.

Considering all that, Silence Yourself might seem like a strangely bossy title for the debut album of a band so concerned with self-expression. But it’s more about shedding distractions. “We’re submerged by voices, opinions, images,” says Beth. “They take us away from who we are. The idea with Savages is to get back to this more focused attention, so you’re harder to reach.”

As a child, Jehnny Beth’s theater-director parents wouldn’t let her watch television or do “kid things.” Born Camille Berthomier in Poitiers, a small city in western France, on December 24, 1984, one of her earliest memories is of touring Russia with one of her father’s plays. She loved the films her parents showed her by Hitchcock, Truffaut, and John Cassavetes, whose New Wave sensibilities played well in France. Silence Yourself begins with a sample of dialogue from Cassavetes' 1977 drama Opening Night, which deals with an older actress' struggle to pursue her career in accordance with her beliefs. “She doesn’t want to follow the rules, so she’s fighting, and that’s what I like about the film," explains Beth. "she would never give up.”

Beth’s parents “emancipated themselves” from their agricultural backgrounds by reading and going to university, and were keen to impress the importance of academic study on Jehnny and her sister. “They were very open intellectually, although still coming from a Catholic background— an interesting mix!” she says with a yelp.

It’s a cold afternoon in January, and Beth is the last member to present herself for an individual grilling at a central London cafe decorated like a mad aunt’s parlor. The band has insisted on being interviewed separately, in consecutive half-hour sessions, a turn of events made no less odd by the fact that Beth records our conversation on an enormous tape recorder that looks like she stole it from a Cold War museum. “For my memories,” she says, in a way that doesn’t suggest something for the grandchildren.

She repeatedly returns to the word “emancipation." When she was in her late teens, she met Nicolas Congé, aka Johnny Hostile, who she calls “a big part in my emancipation as a person, but also as a musician.” They remain together, having moved to London in late 2006, adopting new names to form John and Jehn, a Kills-like duo. That band took precedence over Beth’s burgeoning acting career— she stars in 2005’s A travers la forêt and 2009’s Sodium Babies, two French-made fantasy/horror films. In old interviews, Hostile joked that he kidnapped her.

“Both of us wanted to avoid boredom in a small town in France," Hostile tells me. "We became hyperactive in all aspects of life: how we deal with our job, our sex life, our families, our friends. She emancipated me equally."

“They moved around in a very menacing, jerky fashion," remembers British Sea Power frontman Scott “Yan” Wilkinson, who often had John and Jehn open for his band and gave Savages their first gig in January 2012. “You couldn’t tell if they were going to have a kiss or a fight— made me think of erotic roosters.”

Hostile is always around Savages, his swooping black coat and crooked, Gallic good looks providing no small amount of presence. Although he co-produced their album, his role seems to challenge rather than control; none of the other three members visibly resent his suggestions. He’s aware that he can be domineering, though. Savages was Thompson’s baby, and when she originally asked Hostile to front the band, he declined. “I respect her too much,” he says. “I didn’t want to waste her time with me trying to change everything. She deserved someone easier to work with.”

Beth says Hostile’s role in her liberation means she can’t call herself a feminist. Although she agrees with the movement’s aims for equality, she has misgivings about its wider motivations and is fascinated when women put a feminist reading on Savages. “They tell me they think pornography is bad for women and assume I’m going to understand,” she says. “The thing is, I watch a lot of pornography. It’s been very important for me, to liberate myself from the pressure of romanticism, the myth of a woman’s pleasure.”

Towards the end of Silence Yourself is a song called “Hit Me” that was recorded entirely live, making its Meat Puppets-playing-axel-grinders maelstrom even more striking. “I took a beating today/ And that was the best I ever had,” Beth moans, adopting the perspective of her favorite porn star, Belladonna, who gained widespread notoriety following a 2003 “Primetime” interview with Diane Sawyer in which she cried about some of her experiences, and subsequently became used as a strawman for porn’s "manipulative evils" by lobbyists. (She spoke out afterwards about how "Primetime"'s editing misrepresented her as a victim.)

Elsewhere on the record, Beth sings about dark sexual liberation, unmasking your soul, vanquishing faceless cowards— and finding yourself sleeping with them, too. Though the album’s most surprising lyric is also its most domestic. “How come I’ve been doing things with you/ I would never tell my mum?” Beth sings on the swaggering, Suede-worthy “Strife”. She describes it as “almost showing your weakness” and “that sense of becoming a child again, when you’re doing these crazy, dirty things.”

Savages’ honesty about the complexities of female sexuality places them in an underpopulated but fervent lineage that stretches from Patti Smith through Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and beyond. (At its most aggressive, Beth's wail is a dead-ringer for Karen O’s pixellated yowl.) Women to whom expressing the desire for violent or so-called deviant sexual pleasure is empowering, rather than a cheap signifier of “transgression” or vulnerability.

“I’m trying to talk to people about themselves, to say things as they are, to just tell the truth,” Beth ponders. “And maybe that’s why people come to see us, as an inspiration for emancipation.” She refers to a trans-woman in the process of gender realignment surgery who recently wrote to the band. “Savages was helping her go through this process, the pain,” says Beth. “We were all really moved by it.”