Coney Island is asleep for the winter. The shops and sideshows are shuttered, and the hibernating amusement park rides, typically bursting with color, seem bleached by the gray air. And yet, all is not calm. In the middle of a deserted stretch of pavement, there are jackhammers tearing through concrete and a forklift operator who seems hell-bent on driving his heap of steel beams into oncoming traffic. Dana Margolin, leader and guitarist of UK post-punk group Porridge Radio, observes the scene with perverse delight. “That’s not safe!” she yells, before turning to me, wide-eyed. “I feel like someone’s gonna die.”

With its looming ferris wheel and wooden pier, Margolin notes that Coney Island loosely resembles Brighton, the college town on England’s south coast where she met her bandmates and formed Porridge Radio in 2015. What began as Margolin’s lo-fi solo project has evolved into a fierce wrecking crew fueled by unvarnished angst. On the group’s lurching new album, Every Bad—their first release for esteemed indie imprint Secretly Canadian—Margolin is a snarling antisocial who’s constantly at war with her body and mind.

Recent single “Sweet” has the 26-year-old singer slyly exorcising her anxieties alongside surges of feedback and ripping percussion. In the song’s video, she peers into the lens like she’s trying to pick a fight with the camera—when she strikes a match on her guitar, you half expect her to burn the whole set down. (Instead, she lights a candle.) “When I perform, that’s the energy I’m really channeling,” she tells me. “In the rest of my life, I’m not that intense or confrontational.”

As Margolin takes in Coney Island for the first time, she finds most things ridiculous, and laughs at them accordingly. When we pass a sweet shop window, she stops to peek at a tray of red candied apples. “Who wants an apple covered in sugar?” she wonders. “Give me sugar or give me apple.”