Late March, 2005, Allston: Ironlung is in the parking lot of Mad Oak Studios, a large man stranded in the midafternoon, wearing flip-flops, standing in a desert of cigarette butts, asphalt, despair. His eyes are whirling. His beard has the look of a destroyed mattress. Next to him is Andrew Schneider, the producer, equally gray-faced and smoke-saturated. These are the dregs of the Jaggernaut sessions, after days of sleeplessness and work. Drums, bass and guitar have all been recorded; it remains only for Ironlung to lay down his vocals and Scissorfight’s fifth full-length album will approach completion. But there’s a problem — it’s this track “Dynamite” — the outro needs something — and he’s run out of words . . .

Back inside the studio, a big dozy pitbull called Brady, later credited in the CD liner notes as “sonic consultant,” is infusing the couch with bored-dog smell. Drinks are taken, and Ironlung starts pacing, nodding and mumbling a half-finished verse: “Who’s got the dynamite . . . who wants to fucking go . . . TNT . . . insanity . . . ” (His lyrics are often in this vein — a sort of grand surrealistic menacing.) He brandishes an A4 pad of notes: scrawled images, threats and slogans, in upper case. “CLOSE QUARTERS HUNTING . . . FLORIDA PANTHERS HAVE NO TESTICLES.” One phrase seems to suggest itself: “THE GONG OF LUNACY.” It has a ring to it, an appropriateness. It also rhymes with “TNT.” Brady the pitbull shifts on the couch, sending up another waft of canine ennui. Ironlung begins to rant: “Who’s got the TNT? . . . the gong of luna-cy. . . who’s gonna pass the flame?” Schneider watches him carefully. “So,” he at last suggests, “shall we do it?”

One year later almost to the day, Scissorfight’s singer/lyricist is on the phone from his home on the Outer Cape, contemplating an early-morning fog bank that has gathered offshore and speaking through the mellow cycles of his breakfast cigarette. “What you saw in the studio that time, it’s not all that pretty, is it? You see there’s a man there that’s struggling with something, but that’s the way it is. In that process a vibration or an atmosphere is created. I mean, with me and Andrew, that was me being Klaus Kinski to his Werner Herzog. I’m playing my role and he’s doing his, there’s a chemical thing going on, and you obviously can’t do that unless you know each other pretty well. Andrew . . . he guides, he endures, you know? Ha!”

With Jaggernaut (Hydrahead), Schneider, who’s worked with the band for years, has done his finest production job yet. This is Scissorfight’s Black Album. The clanking backwoods behemoth constructed by guitarist Jay Fortin, the fixated black-metal chord progressions that suddenly flare upward in little schizoid twangs and twizzles of classic rock, Southern-style motifs swinging off the bell of the ride cymbal — it’s all been both fattened and refined. The rhythm section is pawing the ground, the growl of Paul Jarvis’s bass having grown so carnivorous, you can almost hear the drool forming on its tongue. Overlaid onto all of this is a busy layer of randomness and cellular crackle — strange notes and voices, studio buzz, a hacking laugh, the banzai psychedelia of Ironlung. “Funhouse Skull” begins simultaneously in the New Age and the Stone Age, “Can you and I enter into a dialogue knowing neither of us are real?” burbles some sampled Esalen guru from the ’70s, his mind tweet-tweeting with California vacancy, while the band bludgeon their way through a brutally compressed 4/4 intro. It’s the low and the high, the meat and the madness: Scissorfight 2006. “Put it in the basement!” fulminates Ironlung as the verse ends. “Put it in the basement! Put it in the basement! It LIKES the basement!”

Some context here: the man called Ironlung recently completed a 60-page thesis at UMass-Boston called “On Acid: Exploring Representations of LSD Experience.” Nominally from the Granite State, Scissorfight are now dispersed through New Hampshire and Massachusetts; the members gather to practice only when a tour is looming. (They play the Middle East downstairs this Friday, March 24.) It’s hard to avoid the image of Ironlung as a sort of rogue satellite to the band, beaming in his transmissions from the Outer Cape. “Well, the fact that we’re spread out a little bit is naturally gonna make everyone wonder what everyone else is thinking,” says guitarist Fortin. “And he [Ironlung] is the furthest out of all of us . . . ”

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“Jagging,” in the argot of the Outer Cape, is full-on partying, revelry, excess. For those of us who’ve loved Scissorfight since the days of “Planet of Ass,” Jaggernaut brings the band to a new level. Ironlung has left behind his customized folklore of drunken hangmen and black-hatted karate heroes. The legendarium has been emptied of its characters, its masks — no more Hugh Glass, Billy Jack, or “gibbeted Captain Kidd.” Now it’s “High tide of the big grotesque” as he rumbles on “Metal Mother.” Now it’s the man-monster himself who sits on the throne of bone, thick-browed and pop-eyed, gnawing on his own mind. “The tentacle of the funhouse skull/Has run amok with the what the fuck . . . ” (“Funhouse Skull”).

By accident, artistry or chemical misfire, Scissorfight have created the conditions whereby — amid all sorts of musical whacking and chopping — this kind of hallucinated sizzle can persist and even intensify. They should be cherished, or else driven from the village with pitchforks and flaming brands. You decide.

Scissorfight + Cocked N’ Loaded + Hot Rod Fury | March 24 | Middle East downstairs, 472-480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 617.864.EAST.