If Kevin Martin and his assembled crew sounded like they were preparing for a righteous conflagration of a reckoning on 2008’s London Zoo, Fire is what happens after the authorities fail to heed their threats the first time and wind up killing people by cruelty and neglect as a consequence. Not so much a return to form as it is that form re-emerging louder, angrier, and more powerful, Fire exhibits Martin’s ability to make dub-informed bass feel tactile enough to escape its physical confines and drums resonant enough to carry across entire continents with their reverb, every space his sound occupies transforming into a combo bunker/transmitter that draws everyone in to its indestructible energy. If his beats are fearsome machinery, the vocalists have piloted it to take direct aim at the power structure, with a rage fueled by the failures of British (and international) governmental solipsism coming in for a necessary brutalizing. There’s stylistic continuity with The Bug’s earlier works thanks to frequent collaborators like grime vet Flowdan (a being of pure napalm on “Pressure” and “Hammer”) and poet/King Midas Sound partner Roger Robinson (a different, traumatized kind of intensity in COVID-dystopia opener “The Fourth Day” and Grenfell Fire eulogy closer “The Missing”), but there’s always space for fresh voices — especially when the voices are as incendiary in their deep-focus fury as Moor Mother (“Vexed”) and as sharp with a taunting cadence as FFSYTHO (“How Bout Dat”).

Kevin Martin has spent his career examining and loving and reproducing and exploding bass as a sound, concept, and structural approach. The Bug, as a live act, is like being dipped in wax and shoved between two seats in the back of a tractor trailer cab: immersive and hot. Fire is where Martin hits a kind of sweet spot (or hot spot?) of bass density. The framework is Jamaican dancehall and the vocalists are sort of MCs, though nothing is that genre-faithful. Fire also got a nice Godzilla-style horn sound running through it, like this is both the disaster and the announcement of that event, all in one.