Amyl And The Sniffers say that when they are on tour, energy is a precious commodity. Anyone who has ever seen the Melbourne punk quartet live will understand what a massive understatement that is. Their shows are a riotous whirlwind, snarling and menacing and joyous and chaotic all at the same time. You know how sometimes, when you don’t like a band but you don’t want to break it to them, the only compliment you can think of is, ‘That was really tight!’? Amyl And The Sniffers are the opposite of that. They are the anti-tight saviours for people who want their rock’n’roll to sound like it’s about to collapse on top of you.
For the band’s totemic ringleader Amy Taylor, who invariably spends the group’s shows shadow-boxing, climbing lighting rigs and darting around her bandmates, their gigs are the opposite of what everyone is witnessing. Where we see craziness, their singer sees calm. “I’m not thinking at all,” she says. “It’s somewhere between meditation and nothing at all. I don’t know if I think at all. It’s not like we’re the most polished band in the world but so much of what we do is spirit.”
At a time when the world is a bit of an arduous slog, post-pandemic, post-everything being reasonably priced, post-didn’t life used to be easier than this?, Amyl And The Sniffers are that little bit of spirit to put a spring on your step. They’re music’s great escape.
It is 10am on a rainy October morning and the four-piece are crammed into the corner kitchen area of a north London hotel room. Of all the things you could guess about them, it would not be that they are early risers. But here they are, Taylor flanked by guitarist Declan Mehrtens, bassist Gus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson. The promotional campaign for the band’s brilliant new album Cartoon Darkness is in full swing. Last night they appeared on deathly music TV show Later… With Jools Holland and now begins a full day of press and radio interviews. They are not exactly media trained.
“I hate recording,” begins Romer as enquiries into the creation of Cartoon Darkness, their third record, begin. “It’s a fucking pain in the arse. I hate everything except for playing live pretty much.”
When they’re making an album, they explain, there isn't too much talk about what they’re going to do. As you might have guessed from the way their previous two records – 2019’s self-titled debut and 2021 follow-up Comfort To Me – catapulted out of the speakers, this is music made on gut-instinct. “It just kind of happens,” says Taylor, a much more softly-spoken presence than her onstage/in the studio self would let on. “I was just thinking a lot, ‘How can I make this better?’”
“It was more, ‘We’ve gotta get this shit done’,” adds Merhtens.
“There’s not too much analysis going on,” agrees Taylor.
So here are the facts: work on Cartoon Darkness began back at the beginning of 2023 when they wrote and recorded the album’s jagged, groovy centrepiece U Should Not Be Doing That and its B-side Facts. They picked up the pace in January of this year and it was recorded over three weeks at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in California with Yeah Yeah Yeahs producer Nick Launay not long after. “The first few days was going a bit too slow for our liking,” says Romer, whose every utterance is greeted with curiosity by his bandmates at where the sentence might end up. “Just to punch it out as quick as possible is the goal, sitting around and farting around, it’s like, ‘Fuck this’.”
Cartoon Darkness is the band’s best record yet, the riffs sharper, the rhythms a little more swaggering, Taylor’s potent hooks at the centre of it all. It is the sound of Amyl And The Sniffers cleaned up in the way you can polish barbed wire. It’s still barbed wire. Don’t straddle it.
Taylor might not be one to sit and pontificate about the words – “it just happens” might as well be the band’s motto – but she is a thrilling, sharply eloquent and frequently hilarious lyricist. If there’s one unfortunate byproduct of her full-throttle delivery, it’s that some of her zingers get lost in the maelstrom.
“I was just reacting to the world,” Taylor says, reflecting on Cartoon Darkness’s lyrical themes. “I wasn’t like, ‘I wanna say this or I wanna do this or I’ve got all these feelings inside of me’. I’m genuinely pretty out of touch with myself at this point in time so it’s interesting to hear what comes out when you don’t feel like you’re necessarily in sync with yourself.”
Some of the record’s most entertaining moments come when something seems to emerge from deep inside her in a splurge, like the moment in the grimy-glam rocker Tiny Bikini when she appears to salute that great punk maverick Timmy Mallett by rhyming “bikini” with “teeny weeny”.
“It probably was from that!” she laughs. “I did used to listen to that song so it probably weaved its way into my subconscious. I was singing it and just went, ‘argh! Teeny weeny!’”
Her favourite lyric from the album is elsewhere on the same song: “There’s too many snags on the barbie”, a sausage and barbecue reference also serving as a brilliantly piercing line about men and their opinions.
Taylor’s formative experiences as a songwriter were not the norm. There was no sitting with a notebook gazing into the starry-sky. “I used to freestyle rap in the pub in the smoking section,” she hoots. “That’s what I did, that’s when I wrote. I was the best!”
“Amy would be sober too!” interjects Merhtens. “We’d be fucking wasted. Bryce would beatbox and Amy would be there sober, freestyle-rapping… fucking weird!”
They were like a gang from the off, they remember. Ask them for their first impressions of each other and the answers will range from “amazed” to “horrified” to “do not fucking answer that”.
“The first time I met Amy we were all jumping on her bed at 6am,” recalls Romer. “I’d met Gus and he was living in Tassie [Tasmania] and I took him back to Melbourne and I was like, ‘Look what I found!’,” laughs Mehrtens. “Gus had a big red mullet when we met him. It was like when you find a weird rock as a kid. You call the rest of your friends over, ‘Look at this!’.”
“I remember being in bed and hearing them all come home from the club and then I hear this, ‘I’m Gus from Tasmania!’ for two hours,” adds Taylor. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’. He came in with some other people and was jumping on my bed.”
Their ambitions back then were low and local. “It was to play parties and get free booze, pretty much,” says Wilson. “Hang out with other bands that play in Melbourne.”
“We’re not a goal band,” states Taylor. “We’re not like, ‘Let’s get overseas or let’s do this’, we’re very much like, ‘Let’s do what we’re doing now and do it a lot and see what happens’.”
Of course, they did get overseas and have become one of Australia’s most successful exports in recent times. Comfort To Me went to number two in the UK album charts when it was released back in September 2021, and there have been high-profile support shows with Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and more. Throughout November, they’ll embark on their biggest UK and Irish tour to date, culminating in three nights at London’s Roundhouse.
But, as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben almost said, with great success comes loads of people talking shit about you. It’s for a reason that a lot of the lines on Cartoon Darkness are middle-fingered missives to the haters.
“I heard people thought we were nepo babies,” shrugs Mehrtens of one rumour that went round about them. But Taylor has a better one.
“Someone told me once there was a rumour going round that I was actually British and I was rich and I was faking the Aussie thing,” she says, as if her real persona is a posho, Kate Winslet type. It would take some serious method acting if that was so. She’d at least emerge with an Oscar.
“Someone told me and I was like, ‘That’s fucking crazy’,” she continues. “That was a big one. But I think it’s just testament to people’s reactions and people wanting to tear down people and give an excuse as to why it worked out for other people and didn’t work out for themselves. I think when they say something like, ‘Oh, they’re a nepo baby’ or something, which we’re obviously not, my dad was a crane driver, it’s a way for them to go, ‘Oh, they only made it cos of that’, so that’s a good reason in their head why they can justify that their life might be shit.”
It was a theme that Taylor tackled artfully as a recent keynote speaker at Australia’s Big Sound festival, an appearance that demonstrated the 27-year-old doesn’t always require a thrashy, pub-rock backing to make her point. Her lauded speech was funny, insightful, poignant and politicised.
“I was nervous. I was writing it on and off for ages and then I did it and it was fine,” she says. “Everyone was cracking up the whole time. I started it with a joke: ‘When I first told the boys I was gonna be doing a keynote, they said, ‘Which are you using, the key or the note?’.”
The main thing she wanted to get across as she told her story, she says, is how she has learned that music isn’t separate from capitalism. “It’s just another branch of it,” she ventures. “It’s like a subculture in capitalism and a lot of people hope that it’s not but the bigger we get, the clearer I see that it is just the same as any other industry within capitalism, where it’s struggling in the recession and you still have to do shit for money and you still have to do shit for rent.”
Taylor says she also wanted to use the band’s tale as a reason to be optimistic. “I think a lot of people perceive the music industry as dying because of steaming services and Live Nation and stuff like that, there’s a lot of issues in it and that amongst a recession and the changing way that people buy tickets and are spending more time alone, all the cross sections of doom that we’re heading straightforward to, but I wanted to say that as an Australian band we don’t have another job, we can make money off this and we do get to make a living off this and we do get to do all this good shit and we do get to tour the world, people like coming out to our shows. Even though we’re just one case in thousands, it is possible for people to have hope in music.”
The speech took a little practicing, she reveals – she usually listens to podcasts on double-time and when she was rehearsing it, her partner asked why she was talking so quickly. But it was a roaring success, one that maybe suggests she should try her hand at comedy next. “It was great, everyone was laughing and clapping, I was loving it,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna try keep telling jokes cos I love the way they’re laughing at me’.”
But stand-up will have to wait: her band are only just getting going. You can hear that on Cartoon Darkness. It’s not short on firecracker freakouts but there is one song that’s different from the rest. Titled Big Dreams, it’s a woozy, Americana-ish lament with a soulful vocal and reverbed guitars that’s a sort of salute to how far Amy Taylor and her band have come. Taylor wrote the words when she was living in a rental apartment in Melbourne and was thinking how the city still hadn’t recaptured its zest in the wake of the pandemic. “I feel like it’s in a heavy place,” she says. “It’s really hard for a lot of creatives to make money.”
Her thoughts turned to how what she’d achieved with her own group was rare. “No-one else in my life or where I came from who even had aspirations have been able to push through and do other stuff, so I’m thinking about those people cos that’s really shit and it’s hard to watch cos success is measured in such specific ways, it's always pretty large-scale shit and numbered. If you’re in music, it’s streams and numbers, numbers, numbers, how many views, numbers, numbers, how many followers, numbers, numbers. But when you see somebody do what they’re really good at, nothing can take that away even if financial back-up doesn’t ever happen.”
Ask Taylor what her ambitions are these days, or how long Amyl And The Sniffers are going to keep up their status as the most uproariously entertaining band in town, and the answer is simple. “We’re just going along with it until it feels bad,” she says. Right now, though, things are good. Things are very good.
Cartoon Darkness is out on October 25 via Rough Trade Records
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