The first thing you should know about the video single for the new Xiu Xiu record, Dear God, I Hate Myself: Frontman Jamie Stewart did not force new band member Angela Seo to stick her fingers down her throat and vomit copious jets of white goo on-camera while Stewart sat next to her casually eating a chocolate bar. She chose to do that all by herself—in fact, it was her idea.

"There has been some internet chatter about how she is my slave or some bullshit," Stewart wrote in an e-mail. "And it is really bothering her." So let's lay that rumor to rest right now.

The rest of the record is as exquisitely painful as the Dear God video—a giddy cycle of songs, many of them with the fist-in-the-air energy of dance tracks, about sadomasochism of the body and soul. A sampling of lyrics:

"Out of your mind with whorishness/Incredibly young, incredibly filthy/Oh to curse both your life and death/Oh to curse life, oh to curse life"; "Spelling in bruises 'crazy iris,' writing out in welts 'the morbid iris'"; "Lean against the stove/Leave it glowing in the dark/Push my hand to the coil/It is burnt now forever"; "Despair will hold a place in my heart/A bigger one than you do do do/And I will always be nicer to the cat/Than I am to you you you you."

You can hear the sadomasochism in his delivery: Stewart drenches his lyrics with grim, histrionic eroticism. His voice—which can pull itself into high, thin fluttering or sink into barrel-chested barking—is one point in a sometimes collaborative triangle of peculiar Northwest avant-pop voices. The other two belong to Sam Mickens of the Dead Science and Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls. All three are snappy dressers whose voices flit breathily through their upper ranges, richly ornamenting their lyrics with cracks and falsettos. Mickens is the most ethereal and haunting of the three, Pennington is the most purposefully androgynous, and Stewart is the most achingly sincere.

Their mode is baroque and gothic, pretty with a hint of menace; there are blades hiding beneath all that gossamer. (And they take their blood sports seriously: Xiu Xiu and Parenthetical Girls have both recently released limited-edition records and T-shirts signed with the blood of band members.)

If Dear God, I Hate Myself weren't so rigorous and disciplined, it'd be tempting to describe it as a pastiche—so many kinds of sounds jostle against each other from second to second: strings, bongos, Moog, organs, woodwinds, and guitars; plus all the electronics, a whirlwind of bleeps, boops, beats, and old-school laser zaps. Xiu Xiu's preferred mode is dense and dizzyingly polyphonic, musical chaos tightly bound into pop-song shapes. (With some small exceptions: an angular dirge, heavy on the strings and breathy vocals, called "Hyunhye's Theme" and a banjo tune—mountain music leavened with Xiu Xiu's signature ethereality—called "Cumberland Gap.")

Are records like this allowed to have hit singles? They should. If there is any justice in the world, people everywhere will be getting sweaty to "Chocolate Makes You Happy" by the end of the month. Dear God's desperate dance song begins with gongs, cymbals, a storm of electronic static, and piano glissandos before the beat and the yearning kick in:

Chocolate makes you happy/And it keeps you awake/As you unbutton your top pants button/Bewildered by the pain/Chocolate makes you happy/Like a credit to the race/As you ruminate in the arms of coco/On the fatness of your face.

(Did they mean in the arms of "cocoa"? Or in the arms of "Coco," like the dancer/­model/wife of Ice-T? The lyrics sheet is all lowercase, and I'd rather not ask Stewart—let's savor the ambiguity.)

It turns out that "Chocolate Makes You Happy," while being about sex, race, and bulimia, is also about actual chocolate. Stewart had the opportunity to spend time in Torino, Italy, one of the world's great chocolate cities, where he says he "developed a snob's palate for it."

"I have spent a fair amount of this year making my own," he wrote in an e-mail. "However, I have eaten so much that it has caused me some health problems that are affecting my being able to sing. My doctor has told me to stop eating it. That makes me want to die."

In Xiu Xiu's hands, even candy becomes a fraught object, a thing of excruciating pleasure. recommended