Comfort to Me

Amyl and the Sniffers play punk that doesn't nostalgia-mine the genre so much as live inside it as though it never stopped being the necessary response to whatever is happening right now. "Comfort to Me" is the title track of their 2021 album and its thesis statement — Amy Taylor's vocals carrying the roughness of someone who learned to sing in rooms without monitors, direct and physical and uninterested in being polished into something more palatable. The production is no-frills and honest: guitar tones that would be called raw if anyone was being charitable, drums mixed close, bass doing exactly what is needed and nothing else. Lyrically the song is about desire as something practical rather than transcendent — wanting someone because they make the difficult stuff survivable, comfort in its most literal and unglamorized sense. There is an Australian quality to Taylor's phrasing that evokes a particular working-class directness, the band growing from a Melbourne pub scene that has never had much patience for pretension or self-mythology. It is music for sweating in close quarters with strangers who are becoming less strange, for the warm friction of bodies in a small room when the music is too loud for conversation but communication is still somehow happening.