Lydia Lunch

First, Lydia Lunch was the girlfriend of Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators; then she took over the mic herself in Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, then Eight Eyed Spy; since then, she’s been on her own. But she’s always been a mercurial figure, a no-wave queen and a hot-and-cold seductress.

That continues with Smoke in the Shadows, Lunch’s first full album in five years. Slipping into a familiar role-the faded jazz chanteuse, lighting a cigarette with gloved hands and exhaling that first postcoital cloud of smoke-she slips along back alleys drawn from dimestore novels and film noir.

She narrates more than she sings, and her lyrics swerve closer to beat poetry than they do to song structure, but with the able co-production of Nels Cline, Len Del Rio, and Tommy Grenas (all of whom also throw in on songwriting), she doesn’t need to be normal. Lunch’s collaborators-including, notably, Cline’s Geraldine Fibbers bandmate Carla Bozulich-supply bend to her strong will, generating atmospheres sodden with sex and death.

From the break-in of “Hangover Hotel” to the closing “Hot Tip,” Smoke grovels in bad impulses and bodily fluids, lonely horns and sleazy keyboards. Lunch moves through everything here with the air of someone who craves the guilt that comes with the pleasure. Her trick is to make the listener feel the same.