“Hell-On is one of [Case’s] best… her voice remains a force all its own.” [Rolling Stone] … “Soaring” [Entertainment Weekly] … “Gutting” [New York Magazine] … “A pitch-perfect roar of female defiance” [The Guardian]. These are just a few of the peerless reviews of Hell-On, Neko Case’s 8th and latest studio album. In the midst of her US fall headlining tour, Case performed three songs from the record on CBS This Morning: Saturday.

When Neko Case returned to the US and walked through the ruins of her home, the fire that had blazed after these songs were written became part of the record. For the cover, she made a warrior’s helmet out of cigarettes. Interior and exterior shots of her incinerated house appear on the gatefold and booklet. And a tiny pop-open charred Brothers-Grimm cottage serves as the set for the video of “Bad Luck.”

It was as if nature invented a landscape for Hell-On after the fact: a melted ladder, seared insulation dangling in ribbons, the internal organs of pianos. She thought it should all be included in solidarity with those who had lost so much in the past year.

All the living creatures present at the time of the fire were found alive, and so Case was able see beauty in the bleak scene. “It felt like this out-of-time Jacques Cousteau undersea expedition through a sunken World War II ship. Of course there’s some shit I miss,” she says, citing family photographs and a favorite sweater. “But none of it matters.”

And as for those fairy tales she’s writing and the history she’s remembering: “We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don’t end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don’t need Disneyfied stories anymore.”

The record was born at the hands of some three dozen performers in all, from k.d. Lang, Laura Veirs, Beth Ditto, and Robert Forster on backing vocals, to Joey Burns of Calexico and Doug Gillard of Guided by Voices on guitars, and Barbara Gruska and Matt Chamberlain on drums. The sidelong perspective is part of the known Neko galaxy, but the production is more expansive and edgier, moving into new universes. These are songs that can swallow you.

A force of nature, an act of a mercurial, forgotten god, Hell-On is a record sealed by fire, filled with love and rage and dangers that might lay waste to everything at any moment. So if you wake up dazed in a smoking landscape, walking through the detritus of your own lost civilization with the smell of ash in your hair, your favorite sweater gone and a new song in your head, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Neko Case has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to Peer Solutions and support their positive youth leadership and development program designed to prevent harm before it begins and engage lifetime ambassadors of positive change. For more information on Peer Solutions, please visit www.peersolutions.org.