Hard-rock act Royal Thunder drawing rave reviews

It’s like a fist to the jaw, her voice.

It shoots into the song as if emanating from the barrel of a gun as opposed to the lungs of a woman scorned.

“I thought I did the right thing,” Mlny Parsonz gusts on “Plans,” a brittle-hearted torch song that’s like a lit match igniting highly flammable emotions.

Parsonz delivers the song’s opening line with such vehemence, you almost feel like you’re eavesdropping on a private moment between confidants, where guards get dropped and feelings are bared to only the most trusted of ears.

But when she’s on the mic, Parsonz seems all but incapable of equivocation or emotional temperance: She’s all-in, all the time, earning her frequent comparisons to another vocal wildflower: Janis Joplin.

As such, she just might be the most powerful, seriously badass vocalist you’ve never heard of — yet.

That’s starting to change with the recent release of Royal Thunder’s third album, “Wick,” which earned raves in Rolling Stone and is one of the first great hard-rock records of 2017.

The band’s soulful, guitar-driven sound is posited on all things outsize, be it Parsonz’s voice, guitarist Josh Weaver’s alternately chiming and soaring riffs or the climactic moments of release that the band continually works toward.

Founded in Atlanta, but currently based in Savannah, Georgia, Royal Thunder is yet another standout in those cities’ fertile heavy-music scenes, populated by the likes of Mastodon, Baroness, Black Tusk, Kylesa, Zoroaster and Withered, among others.

But while its members are friends with plenty of those bands and have gigged with a number of them, Royal Thunder is less a metal band than a reaction to being in one — at least for Weaver, who founded the group in 2004.

“I played in genre bands for so long — heavy music, heavy bands — and I got tired of that,” he says. “You can only be creative within a box for so long without just getting tired of it, you know? I said, ‘Let’s just go in this room, and whatever comes out, if it’s pretty and soft or heavy and super rockin’, let it be.’ ”

Royal Thunder is all those things, often at once, informed by the ringing guitars and gutbucket vocals of some of the best ’70s hard rockers, but filtered through scouring ’90s indie rock.

“Wick” starts on a low simmer, taking its time to draw listeners in and work itself to a boil with a pair of more ruminative numbers.

But by the fourth track, “We Slipped,” the band’s in full lather, Parsonz wailing like an air-raid siren over the full-contact rhythm section of drummer Evan Diprima and bassist Will Fiore.

From there, the album only builds on this momentum, cresting into an instinctive sounding record, visceral and emotionally raw, a product of how it was made: Royal Thunder hit the studio this time with one song written, creating everything else on the spot.

“We’ve never really gone into the studio and said, ‘We want the record to sound like this,’ ” Weaver says, “because I think we want it to be honest and real and don’t want there to be any boundaries on what comes out.

“When we first get in the studio, it’s always one of those things where you just don’t know what it’s going to sound like. It’s almost like a kid being born: you have no idea what it’s going to look like. It can be overwhelming at times. You come up with these basic ideas and you’re like, ‘Man, how is this going to turn out?’ ”

“Wick” answers this question with aplomb and finesse, muscle and melodrama.

It’s the sound of a band finding its sound.

“It’s definitely another chapter for this band,” Weaver says. “I think we’re finding out who we are more and more, finding our voices, individually and as a band.

“It’s just living life,” he adds. “I think people hear that.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.