Look! Up in the sky! It’s a Meteorite! blazing across the cosmos to announce that Bas Clas is back with a vengeance. On their fourth release since 2011, when Lafyette’s bad-boy mavericks reunited to rock Festival International with their first new material since their glory days in the ‘80s, Bas Clas delivers a lean, mean set of originals that spark combustive reactions in both your body and your mind.

Though the band hasn’t lived in Lafayette for years, it still draws deep from the well of Acadiana that nurtured guitarist Steve Picou and his singer-songwriter brother Donnie, now based in New Orleans and Atlanta respectively, and the original Bas Clas rhythm section with Geoff Thistlewaite on bass and Ted Cobena on drums.

That link is unmistakable in “Lost in the Search,” an achingly poignant Cajun waltz borne aloft on the strings of guest fiddlers Jonno Frishberg and Chris Stafford. But it also comes through loud and clear in the swirling Cajun psychedelia of Steve Picou’s guitar in “Oh Well,” which recalls the Bas Clas classic “Allons Danser” thematically as well as musically. For like the unwitting dancers stalked by death in “Danser,” the clueless protagonist of “Oh Well” “handled the serpent because I believed he wouldn’t strike,” evoking the great unmasked COVID deniers.

Elsewhere, the Bas Clas rave-up song “Dead End Street” targets the COVID Denier-in-Chief’s adoring masses, “who follow the leader one by one … down a one-way dead end street,” while the minor-key lament “Meet the Cheaters” nails the whole Trumpian krewe of grifters and enablers. A timely addition to the Bas Clas canon, Meteorite gives it to us straight, no chaser, while driving us out of our pandemic doldrums with kick-ass beats. And that, my friends, is no small feat.