Is Poison Ruin taking punk back to the dark ages or into the future?

The eternal paradox of punk rock is that all the sneering and snarling designed to draw you in is the very stuff responsible for keeping others out. Punk is a music that bristles at an unjust world, and if the stylized hostility doesn’t scare you away, you can align yourself with it, until it’s bristling on your behalf. You’ll know you’ve encountered a truly great punk band when their sound acts like a vetting mechanism, then as a sort of protective force field.

Poison Ruin is a truly great punk band, but the force field is a moat. The Philadelphia quartet leans hard on the kind of medieval tropes more frequently deployed by kitsch-curious heavy metal groups (album covers adorned with ancient warriors, song titles pocked with umlauts), but their sound is very much their own. And that juxtaposition feels weird, exciting and exclusive. Surely, Poison Ruin knows that our soggy, pop-cultured brains are tired of sweaty beardos in chain mail. We’ve all lived through too many seasons of “Game of Thrones,” too many zany birthday parties at Medieval Times. In which case, cool, fine, stay away.

But if you choose to go there, the band’s unblinking new album, “Harvest,” will reveal its lack of shtick on impact. During the opening track, “Pinnacle of Ecstasy,” drums and guitars conjure a mood as uncaring as cold rain while bandleader Mac Kennedy mulls the arithmetic of life and death, pushing the bleakest words he can locate through a grunty accent presumably lost to the centuries: “Rot, face down in the gutter, covered in flies, covered in [excrement], some pitiful sum gained and spent.” Instead of whisking us off to some enchanted fantasyland, “Harvest” begins on the void’s ugliest edge.

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Just as staggering are the layers of influence Poison Ruin manages to fold into its thin, brittle sound — the harsh illegibility of raw black metal, the lumpy brusqueness of classic oi! music, the sly depravity of ’70s hard rock, the principled stiffness of anarcho punk. Hard music requires hard listening, which means you might detect the aura of Motorhead via Discharge, or the Ramones via the Spits, or the conjoined ghosts of the Wipers and Dead Moon, or maybe even an unlikely whiff of Poison Ruin’s widely forgotten Philly dungeon punk forebears Excelsior.

And if those kinds of lists make you feel as if you’re squinting at the ingredients on a bag of off-brand potato chips, just know that this is a hyper-fluent punk band that’s ultimately more interested in bigger pictures and deeper time scales. During the smothered, lo-fi rumble of “Blighted Quarter,” Kennedy evokes an “untenable land” from a thousand years ago, but eventually comes to understand optimism as a necessary component of survival: “A wildflower blooms when left alone. There is a beauty.”

Maybe that’s what awaits us inside the circumference of the moat. Safety. Solitude. A fresh shot at tomorrow. Because Poison Ruin’s whole trip isn’t some time machine retreat from our techno dystopian near-future. It’s a premonition of the dark age that follows. And so long as our planet’s mounting afflictions remain unaddressed by cowardly and inert governments, both eras are closer than we think. Pretending otherwise is the fantasy.

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