Amyl and the Sniffers at The Anthem on June 10

Last Wednesday, the Anthem hosted two Australian bands who make a convincing case that punk and rock music are very much still alive and screaming. The openers, Party Dozen, shocked the crowd with their lack of conventional instrumentation. In the place of a guitar or bass, Kirsty Tickle, a saxophonist from Sydney, screams into the bell of her instrument while a bank of effects pedals chews her voice and plays her into something barely human. Her otherworldly sound is complemented by the fast-paced and bass-heavy sound of Jonathan Boulet behind the drum kit. The duo operates somewhere in the territory of noise rock and punk, creating an avant-garde and powerfully strange sound. The haunting shrieks of the saxophone primed the crowd for the electricity of the night’s headliners: Amyl and The Sniffers.

When Amy Taylor and her band walked out onto the stage, there was an immediate swell of bodies rushing forward against the barricade, trying desperately to reach the glowing, platinum-haired star standing above. With frenetic and fun tunes like “Chewing Gum,” “Me and the Girls,” “Jerkin’,” and “Doing in Me Head,” Amyl and the Sniffers were a force to be reckoned with. The crowd became a single, roiling mass, swelling and ebbing against the barricade with the flow of the music. By the end of the show, audience members were sure to have been left sweaty, battered, and bruised from the churning turmoil of the crowd. Amyl and The Sniffers left DMV punks with scratchy throats from screaming along to ear-worm lyrics, leaving the venue already reaching for their phones to see when the band might return next.

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Sasha Jayne is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.