If Rammstein was a vehicle, it’d be a Stretch Hummer: brazen, overstated and decidedly un-PC. It’s fitting, then, that the first Australian listening session for the German sextet’s new album Liebe ist für alle da takes place in one of these ludicrous gas-guzzlers.

We all pile in at Universal Music HQ and inform the driver he’s in for a rattling 45 minutes on the road. Heading out at the very Stretch Hummer-inappropriate hour of four pm Thursday, we crack a beer and settle in.

Liebe ist für alle da – which translates as Love Is for Everyone – comes four years after Rammstein’s last effort Rosenrot, and if the press notes are to be believed it almost didn’t get made. The band comprises six members, none of them shrinking violets, and a decision to work democratically meant there was plenty of bristling tension in the studio (you could call it – œswinging of dicks’, but after seeing the Pussy video that image is perhaps too visceral).

Unsurprisingly, the new album is a beast. Cranked at full volume as you cruise the tourist checklist of Sydney certainly makes for a surreal experience. The FasterLouder review will offer a proper dissection (I was too busy getting ear-pummelled by the speaker beside my head), but all the songs are joyously big. The pop and electronic sensibilities are on full display, bolstered by Christoph Schneider’s thunderous drums and bludgeoning riffs from Richard Zven Kruspe-Bernstein and Paul H. Landers.

Production is characteristically – œclean’ in its own heavy-hitting way – a statement that thankfully doesn’t extend to the lyrics. Till Lindemann still has a way with seamy words, and the translated lyrics sheet is replete with sex, violence, violent sex and other things that don’t blend well with the sunny scenes passing outside our (tinted) windows.

With its chorus chant of “RAMMSTEIN!”, album opener Rammlied [Ramm-Song] is sure to be a live successor to Du Hast. Perhaps most sonically interesting on first listen is Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood), which makes powerful use of pauses in its offensive. Then there’s the gleeful weirdness: lead single Pussy matches cheeseball keyboard with lines like “put a bratwurst in your sauerkraut”, while Frühling In Paris (Springtime In Paris) is as close to balladeering as Rammstein can get. Liebe ist für alle da offers one hell of a ride – in a Stretch Hummer or otherwise.

Liebe ist für alle da is out Friday 23 October on Universal Music.