Between life and death in these strange days comes the welcome voice of Laura Jane Grace.

The Against Me! singer and guitarist has taken a break from both her superb punk band and her side project, Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers. She’s alone in a Chicago studio for the pandemic-inspired “Stay Alive,” except for producer Steve Albini.

“This only feels like the death of everything,” she sings in the first song. It concludes 13 songs later with the raw-sung plea: “Please stay alive/please survive!”

Recorded in just days in July, the album is somewhat of a mixed bag, but always fascinating, lifted by lyrics that are equal parts opaque, raw and funny. “I am a haunted swimming pool/I am emptied out and drained,” she sings on the opener, “The Swimming Pool Song.” Later, you’ll run to a dictionary to try to understand what “petrified polymorphs” are.

Grace misses traveling — and, in particular Portugal — in “The Calendar Song,” but is ambivalent about travel on “Shelter in Place,” where she notes: “There’s always someone dying to leave/Where you’re dying to get to.” The album also includes what can only be described as an anti-Trump scream in “Hanging Tree,” with the line: “You can’t trust a man with hair like that.”