"Meth metal" band Owen Hart have a talent for demanding attention, whether through the aggro assault of their music or with disarmingly twisted, comical track titles. They're as heavy as they are heavily self-aware; even their name has a morbid, winking quality, deriving from the famed WWF wrestler who plummeted 78 feet to his death at Kemper Arena in 1999. And while the quintet's songs hit with all the force of an unexpected gut-punch, silly titles like "Fuck Morrissey, Fuck The Smiths, Fuck The Cure" and "Welcome To Worthless-Piece-Of-Shit-Ville, Population: You" (from their forthcoming Earth Control, due out Jan. 18 on Vitriol Records) make their music all the more disorienting and impressive.

"I think our humor keeps us grounded," drummer Brian Skiffington says. "Most metal bands these days are still singing about goblins, vampires and dragons, (or) fantasy bullshit, (or) glorifying the abuse of women or brooding about the apocalypse ... (Owen Hart frontman Timm Trust) sticks to his guns with his song titles."

Musically, Owen Hart is relentlessly intense, serving up richly layered core-suffixed metal with flamboyant Slayer-esque guitar licks, spastic time changes, breakneck drumming and blood-curdling barbarian vocals. It's also characteristically Northwestern - the first sound heard on Earth Control is rain dripping ominously from a gutter.

The LPs lead-off single "Methlehem" - written about Trust's experience growing up in drug-addled Parkland, Wash. - perfectly captures the dreariness and abject darkness of Pacific Northwestern suburbs. (Owen Hart would make an apt, if offbeat, substitution for Angelo Badalamenti's timeless Twin Peaks score - appropriately, when the band plays Seattle next week, they'll be performing at a DIY space called The Black Lodge.)

"The Pacific Northwest is a real breeding ground for depression and escape through drug use," Skiffington says. "Gray skies, terrible traffic. Boeing firing thousands of employees every year. High concentration of military families. ... The subject matter of our songs is heavily weighted in real life situations, social issues, shit we all deal with."

Despite their hardnosed perspective on the region, Owen Hart has some serious hometown pride. The liner notes to their inclusion on This Comp Kills Fascists Vol. II (curated by deathgrind luminary Scott Hull) include a shout-out to Tacoma and, as Skiffington reveals, "All of us have been playing music in the South Sound in different capacities for the last eight to twelve years. We have a lot of pride in this town and in our friends. We don't take anything for granted," he says, adding, "Fuck Seattle."

Owen Hart are not only proud Tacomans, they're also all-ages-friendly DIY hard-liners: "We have never played a 21+ show in seven years of being a band and have managed to tour more and accomplish more than any band I can think of from our city," Skiffington boasts.

Remarkably, Owen Hart's been able to juggle this anti-ageist sincerity, lyrical weightiness and provocative humor simultaneously, making them a totally singular, sinister-sounding force in the South Sound's musical landscape.

[Northern, Owen Hart with Deafheaven, Dead Head, Friday, Jan. 7, 8 p.m., all-ages, 321 Fourth Ave., Olympia, northernolympia.org]