“My Lover the Killer,” Lydia Lunch’s recent album with French industrial musician Marc Hurtado, begins with a creeping sense of anxiety and the sound of jazz playing in some dystopian wasteland. Metal scrapes against metal, and a sound like a clock chime repeats again and again, each time more inexplicably unnerving than the last.

“There’s something about how fine their bones are under their flesh,” says Lunch on the opening track, “Nursing Damage Junkies,” her voice a dripping with wicked-witch menace and black humor, “the possibility of shattering them under my need.”

In some ways, the dark, unsettling album is par for the course for Lunch, who will be performing spoken word as part of Guerilla Theater at 9 p.m. April 28 at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester. In other ways, it seems a reinvention of sorts — one of many in her legendary career, which stretches back the ’70s, across the heydays of punk rock and the New York No Wave scene, and which has extended into the present with numerous bands — including Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, 8 Eyed Spy, Big Sexy Noise and Retrovirus — and collaborations with musicians

“I’m not a traditional composer,” says Lunch, who will perform at 9 p.m. April 28 as part of Guerilla Theater with Cassie J. Sneider, Nonye Brown-West and Hard Nips at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester. “I’m not even a musician, although I can play a few instruments … musical schizophrenic is the best way to describe what I do. The only thing that relates one album or phase to the next is that I’m involved in it. Some people have one sound, 20 albums that sound the same. I think of the concept first, then collaborators.”

The result is a songbook that’s truly unique, and which has evolved and deepened over the years, a fact that’s obvious if you contrast “”My Lover The Killer” with her 1980 solo debut, “Queen of Siam.”

“I see the connective tissue, because of the schizophrenia,” says lunch. “Within the album itself it feels schizophrenic … nursery rhymes, big band songs … songs like Mechanical Flattery.” The latter is, like “Killer,” a macabre, fear-inducing dark lullaby: “Ran away dark dank stank moss creeps/Cross the river I run from the dark stark fear,” she sings, her voice more girlish, but still unsettling. Performing the song more recently, on the 2015 Retrovirus album “Live in Zurich,” her lower range magnifies the song’s menace, as does the band’s squealing, off-kilter metal thump: Lunch calls it, “Goth blues.”

Retrovirus comprises Lunch, guitarist Weasel Walter, bassist Tim Dahl and drummer Bob Bert (of Sonic Youth fame), and the arrangement brings out different dimensions in Lunch’s work. Likewise, she says the 2016 spoken word album “Brutal Measures,” performed with Walter on drums, “is completely improvised.” She had the words written, but the collaboration was “kind of like tag team. It’s an interesting format to me. He’s going to throw a ball out of left field every time.”



At Ralph’s, Lunch will be wearing her “spoken word” hat, “ranting poetics and storytelling, she says. “Ranting about ‘the present situation’ a bit, show the variety of the sort of thing I do. Somebody has to deal with the other side of dilemma.” She says she moved to Barcelona when George W. Bush was re-elected, and is not lost on the irony of returning to the United States in time for the Trump administration.

She says “political obsession” is almost as big of a topic for her as “personal obsession,” but if there’s one consistent theme throughout her work, it’s “the cancer of birth,” or the omnipresence of physical, mental and emotional anguish in life. It’s her fearlessness in the face of that anguish that makes her such a compelling artist.

That ability to stare into the abyss without flinching is what makes “Killer” such a striking album, one that becomes even more compelling when she reveals that “It’s a real story.”

Lunch says she had been planning on meeting an ex-lover, whom she hadn’t seen in a decade, but on that day he got into an altercation with his girlfriend, whom he shot and killed.

“I can’t say I was that shocked,” says Lunch, “because I knew the person. They had turned their life around, nobody could have seen this coming … I guess just knowing the place where it came from, it wasn’t that shocking.”

She says she doesn’t know if the event changed her at all, but in comparing “Killer” to her earlier work, it’s clear she’s pivoted from talking about being damaged to discussing dealing with damaged people, which is a major theme on “Killer.”

“We all go through this,” says Lunch. “We can’t save anybody but ourselves. Not that you can’t help people, but people who have been traumatized … they can see that (other traumatized people) were before … that innocent teenager before whatever damaged them beyond repair. Of course we have empathy, but you can’t have it at the cost of your own existence.”

Lunch’s work might be filled with monsters and murderers, both real and metaphorical, but in the end, it’s not about reveling in those demons, so much as it is about surviving them.

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.