The Comfort Talk About Upcoming Album “Experience Everything. Live And Die” In Q&A
Based in the sunny state of Queensland, alternative-rock band The Comfort are rightfully making 2022 their own with a string of incredible releases to tease fans for their album drop “Experience Everything. Live And Die” on November 11th via Greyscale Records. It was such an honour to be able to do a Q&A with the band and you can read it all below.
Photo: Nick Hargans
Tell us what we can expect from the upcoming album ‘Experience Everything. Live And Die.’?
It feels like a “Greatest Hits” in the sense that it is very eclectic, whereas our debut album ‘What It Is To Be’ was a very particular sound and it was all moving in the same direction and something designed to listen to front to back. This album is a collection of everything The Comfort does, pushed to the limits. We have the heaviest, most aggressive music we’ve ever made on this album as well as the most melodic, classic and pop leaning music we’ve ever made. We just decided to lean into whatever each song called for to make it the best we could.
What is your favourite track from the album and why?
My personal favourite is ‘You’, it may even be my favourite song I’ve ever written. It’s a type of song I’ve wanted to write for a really long time. It's like our version of ‘Transatlanticism’ and I’m super proud of it.
We saw everything in the music scene come to a halt in 2020 and unfortunately a lot of bands lost their motivation and decided to call it quits. While The Comfort was on hiatus from 2019, what made you want to come back and release the new music?
We accidentally timed things quite well and were in the middle of recording the album just as the lockdowns went serious. The restrictions did cause us to pause recording for a few months as we all couldn’t be in the same room, but instead of having a year of touring pulled out from under us like everyone else we had already planned to not be touring and by the end of 2020 we had the album recorded. Unfortunately ongoing restrictions, vinyl delays etc meant we had to take a longer break than intended but we’ve just been waiting to release this album. It has breathed new life into us and we’re excited for the future.
You’ve been announced as the support for Terra on their national tour! What are you most excited about?
Just playing these new songs, it’s really exciting to play new music for the first time and we’ll be playing all our new songs as well as a couple older ones. We were really nervous for our last tour with Waxflower as it was the first time we’d played live in over 2 years, now we feel like we’re back in the groove and just genuinely excited to play music again and hopefully win over some new people.
Take us through your creative process when it came to writing the new album.
It was quite varied as we each write a bit differently, it was definitely the most collaborative project we’ve done. We really just set out to do whatever we wanted, as long as we loved it and it gave us that feeling you can only get from music. It didn’t really matter what genre it was as long as it made sense in context when listening to the full album. We pushed ourselves to our creative limits and would let the music decide what we would do, if something called for a “breakdown” we did it, then if the next song was more pop leaning we made sure to service that instead of trying to make it something it wasn’t. We took a break to write this album and we didn’t want to come back to the music industry until we had something that we were completely happy with and proud of and I think we did that.
What are your favourite lyrics you’ve ever written and what do they mean to you?
This is a bit full on, so apologies, but I also think it’s important to speak bluntly and truthfully about mental health issues. “If I truly believe we live on when we die maybe this pain will always be mine” - I of course have doubts, but my best guess is that there is more to reality and consciousness than our physical dimension. This line from our song “Pain” is wondering if I will carry what I feel and who I am into the next version of existence if I were to die. This song is really important to me and the band. I really hate the way our society deals with things and is scared to have real meaningful conversations so this song was me being as painfully honest as I could be. It’s suggested that when there is news or depictions of suicide in media that rates of self harm and suicide goes up, so our current way to dealing with that is to not address the reality of these situations openly and then put a hotline number at the end of an article as an afterthought and tell people to reach out and put all the onus on the individual to drag themselves out of what they’re feeling. My thought would be, maybe the rates of these things go up because we’ve created a society where there is nowhere to openly discuss these issues and no opportunity to try and create better systems of support for people, that the mere mention of these things just reminds people in a similar position that there is very little help out there for them.
Where do you hope to see the band in 5 years time?
I had a bit of a revelation a few weeks back and felt like sharing it so posted it on our facebook, I don’t think The Comfort will ever end. I kinda have to write music or I’m not as happy and we’ve got such a dedicated group of people that listen to us and get us it would feel weird to not keep that relationship going for as long as possible. So I hope we’re still doing what we’re doing, releasing music we love for people who care.