Amyl & The Sniffers: “The more people love you, the more who are gonna hate you”

Amyl & The Sniffers embrace chaos, humour, and fire on their third album.

Words: Ciaran Picker.

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If you want a band to tread on eggshells and ease you in, then Amyl & The Sniffers aren’t the band for you. Renowned for being a heartfelt throwback to the days of vicious, visceral punk-rock, thrashing and brawling their way to the top of the tree, they find themselves at the biggest point of their career. To document this exact moment – this tightrope between cult following and global stardom – they’re back with an album that delves deeper into their political message, full to the brim with personality and with more panache and poise than you might expect.

Recorded at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles, their third album ‘Cartoon Darkness’ takes personal diary entries and morphs them into a universal experience, backed up by a soundscape that’s kicked up into sixth gear and befits the hallowed ground on which the album was made. “It was very, very special,” vocalist Amy Taylor reminisces. “We were using the desk that’s been signed by Stevie Nicks. It’s where ‘Rumours’ and ‘Nevermind’ were made, so it’s like, ‘If this album is shit, it’s our fault!’”

Thankfully – and unsurprisingly – the album is far from it. Arguably their most rounded release yet, ‘Cartoon Darkness’ contains all the impish charm and mischief that you’d expect – plus enough foul language in opening track ‘Jerkin’’ to make those of a nervous disposition have a fit – but with an added depth and layering of sounds that turns a run-of-the-mill punk album into a record that sees the Melbourne quartet set their sights on the stratosphere.

‘Cartoon Darkness’ embodies the world around them from both a personal and societal perspective. Covering topics as universally important as climate change, the use of data and AI, and ongoing widespread misogyny, it’s a searing tirade that proves Amyl & The Sniffers have no intention of curbing their fiery side in favour of more fame. It’s brought them this far, so why can’t it take them even further?

“The future might end up being pretty dark, but it’s drawn with a pencil; it’s not set in stone”

Despite this laser-like focus on the issues of the day and the added pressure of the history of their surroundings, there’s still more than enough humour and levity on the record, providing much-needed relief from what could otherwise be pretty demoralising subject matter. This clash between fury-fuelled ragers and humour-heavy breaks is the exact conundrum summed up in the album’s title.

“It’s a phrase that had been bouncing around in my head for a while,” Amy reveals, “and it’s how I perceive the future. It’s all pretty up in the air and unknown; it’s hard not to be pessimistic. But that ‘Cartoon’ element is basically saying that it’s not definite; it’s a sketch – the future might end up being pretty dark, but it’s drawn with a pencil; it’s not set in stone.”

The phrase is a lyric used in punk anthem ‘Doing In Me Head’, one which uses the rebellious spirit of 1970s anarchists to analyse 2024 with a fire and frustration that is almost depressingly relatable. Where it’s easy to get dragged down by this, Amy does the opposite, running headfirst at a problem with a cheesy grin and determined ambition.

“Everything feels bad because we care so much about it. It’s like this adoration for the world around us; we’re mourning something we already have instead of enjoying it while we have it. Civilisations fall all the time, society gets gutted to nothing and rebuilds itself, but there’s always something next.”

She continues: “If global warming takes over the world and we all melt and burn, there’ll be some little fish down by the Earth’s crust that loves the heat and is just waiting for it all to get hotter so it can evolve. So yeah, it would suck that I couldn’t get my yummy iced latte and that I’d die immediately if we had to go and live in the wilderness, but hey, that’s life!”

This glass-half-full attitude manifests itself lyrically, particularly in the tongue-in-cheek takes on femininity and conservative outrage in ‘Tiny Bikini’ and ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’, but also in the egregiously massive classic rock guitar that’s peppered across the album, marking a clear intent to turn up the volume, turn up the glamour, and stake their claim at world domination.

In many ways, ‘Cartoon Darkness’ is the band getting their ducks in a row before they hit the big time – not that they’re not already hugely important for the scene. Bassist Gus Romer, who openly admits that he is “relieved to be fuckin’ done with writing and recording”, acknowledges that this album felt completely different to both their self-titled debut and sophomore record, ‘Comfort To Me’.

“[‘Cartoon Darkness’] was definitely harder. I hate just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping it sticks, and we’re a democracy as a band, which makes everything just take longer. But this time, the scale is so different; we were definitely trying to make a record that fits the size of where we are now.”

“It would suck that I’d die immediately if we had to go and live in the wilderness, but hey, that’s life!”

The band have evolved with each album cycle, slowly testing out the boundaries of what they can do both as a group and individually. Where Gus took the reins on ‘Comfort To Me’, it was guitarist Declan Martens who brought a lot of the ideas to the table for ‘Cartoon Darkness’, something which contributed to the band’s sound at both ends of the volume scale (and also provides what Amy describes as “important context for why Gus is so cranky”).

While there are huge licks and riffs dotted across most of the tracks, most clearly in ‘Do It Do It’ and ‘Motorbike Song’, he equally added a more melodic element to the album, breaking up the cathartic thrash and ferocious punk with tracks he’d been too afraid to reveal to the band before this point, most clearly in the form of almost-acoustic heartbreak ballad ‘Bailing On Me’.

“Declan came to me with all these tracks that he’d been writing since the band started,” Amy remembers, “but he said, ‘I don’t know if these are right for Amyl because they’re too soft’. We played them through, and actually, a lot of them made it onto the record. This is the first album where everyone brought whatever they had to the table, and we picked songs based on merit rather than just what’s gonna go the hardest when we play it live.”

This is a lesson they first learned during the creation of ‘Comfort To Me’, but after two years of touring that record and a bunch of ticked-off checkboxes, ‘Cartoon Darkness’ finds Amyl & The Sniffers at their most thoughtful and their most reflective.

“For the first album, it was literally just mosh-orientated, and for album two, we said, ‘Ok, maybe we can make something that goes hard but doesn’t sound shit on record’. Where we are now though – we’re almost all 30, me and Declan have moved out to Los Angeles, and we’re tapping into a global scene rather than just touring Australia. We’re exploring all these things and yeah, hopefully people don’t hate it!”

All of this chopping and changing, both personally and collectively, doesn’t seem to have fazed them too much, though, and they clearly have no plans of slowing down any time soon. The band are still as intent on poking the bear as much as they can, goading their haters in a way that makes them even more endearing to their fans.

Amy, rifling through her bag of unique metaphors, describes it as only she could: “It’s like if fame was taxable – the more fame you get, the more tax you have to pay; the more people love you, the more who are gonna hate you – but you know, fuck ‘em! I wanna do this more than I don’t wanna be judged, so we’re not gonna stop just because Jack from Europe doesn’t like what we do.”

“It makes me feel powerful; fuck the haters always”

Part of Amyl’s appeal has always been the fact that, as much as they are masters of chaos and seemingly uncontrollable noise, they have always been aware of every detail and how it relates to the wider project. So, where Amy’s choices to wear crop tops and short skirts might just seem like a stage stunt, it actually has a much wider application to what Amyl are and what they stand for.

“As a scantily clad lady, you’re always gonna cop a lot of shit. People reduce your success to just the way you look, so it’ll be, ‘People only like you because you’ve got stripper shorts on’. But that’s part of the art and the aesthetic – I wear it because it makes me feel powerful, and also, y’know, fuck the haters always.”

‘Cartoon Darkness’ is both a middle finger to all the people who have always hated what Amyl & The Sniffers stand for and a rallying cry for their fans, demanding that they keep their eyes open and principles strong, even while they’re rocking out to this snarling selection of sheer brilliance.

“There’s a lot of joy and fun, but I didn’t want it to feel like we were letting people tap out of the big issues. This is us saying, ‘Have fun, but pay attention’.” In this vein, the band recently played a show in Melbourne in support of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, underlining their continued commitment to use their position for good.

“I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere,” Amy ponders, “but in Aus, it feels like it’s always bands or creatives that put their hands in their pockets first to try to help, whether that’s for asylum seekers or for recent bushfires. I guess it’s all about that community feeling.”

Amyl & The Sniffers equally stand out as a band that people look to, not only for a live show that lets them scream out their fears and frustrations but as one that fills the void of hope left by decades of political decisions and governmental incompetence.

“I think that the situation in Palestine has definitely opened people’s eyes to the fact that governments are just shells,” Amy states. “In Australia, we’ve got left-wing voters saying, ‘Help out Palestine and stop providing bombs’, and a left-leaning government that just isn’t listening. There’s a lot of disdain and disillusionment where even I don’t know who I would vote for in the future.”

This latest phase in Amyl’s existence is a timeless reminder of the importance of real political punk. It’s no coincidence that they find themselves on the verge of greatness at exactly the moment when everything else feels on the verge of falling apart. There’s a revolution on the horizon, and Amyl & The Sniffers are the marching band leading the charge.

One last Amy Taylor-patented metaphor speaks to the fire at the heart of ‘Cartoon Darkness’ that keeps Amyl & The Sniffers driving on: “Success is like feeding a stomach: the more you feed it, the bigger it gets and the more food you can eat. We’ve had a taste of what it can be; now we want more and more.”

Make a note of this moment. It’s the one just before Amyl & The Sniffers take their place in the punk-rock Hall of Fame. They’re already one of the biggest bands in the world, and they’re only just getting started.

Taken from the November 2024 issue of Dork. Amyl & The Sniffers’ album ‘Cartoon Darkness’ is out 25th October.