Amyl and the Sniffers know their main weapon is the thrilling way their frontwoman skates and spits above the riffage.Credit: John Angus Stewart
Amyl and the Sniffers, Cartoon Darkness
Amy Taylor is keen to show us her breasts. It’s her album cover, so you’d think that would be that. The Slits did it in 1979 for heaven’s sake. But this is 2024, so the artist’s intentions are censored for our protection. Offence is harder to give, and so much easier to take these days. Tough times for the punk at heart.
This modern feedback loop between the individual’s demand for unfettered self-expression and the backlash of instant social outrage is ground zero for the third album by Melbourne-based, globally feted garage rock ratbags Amyl and the Sniffers.
“You’re a dumb c---, you’re an a---hole,” are Taylor’s first words out of the gate. Jerkin’ is a vicious smackdown of critics, trolls and “f---ing spiders” that’s clearly been brewing a while. The latter rhymes with “I am drinking riders” in case you thought she was losing sleep about what you think of her.
Self-definition is a big theme. “I will not be told what I control,” she roars in the meat grinder of It’s Mine. “I am sick of promising everyone that I am the same as others,” she rants later. Her naughty-girl meow is no less defiant in Tiny Bikini: “If I didn’t show up in something spicy/ The cold world would feel even more icy,” she tells the “snags at the party”.
The Sniffers’ sonic recipe remains unapologetically basic: a high-tension thump, thrash and thunder palette more concerned with energy than nuance. Bryce Wilson, Dec Martens and Gus Romer are a perfectly shabby-tight power trio, but they know their main weapon is the thrilling way their frontwoman skates and spits above the riffage.
Self-definition is a big theme of Cartoon Darkness.Credit: John Angus Stewart
Taylor’s tuneless rap sticks to the rollercoaster rails of Chewing Gum and rises to bark and crack at the full-throttle pitch of Motorbike Song. She’s Johnny Rotten’s cartoon kid sister in Pigs but she nails more subtle characters too: a sinister siren for wasted youth chasing Big Dreams, and a surprisingly vulnerable romantic reject in the melodic respite of Bailing On Me.
That song is the bravest departure here from Amyl and the Sniffers’ shaken and slammed formula, doubtless fodder for the keyboard warriors of Jerkin’ to start howling “sell-out”. That’s the price of evolution for any band, but it’s payable immediately in the social media cesspit that clearly plagues Amy Taylor’s head.
It’s this dramatically compressed spitting distance between band and audience that sets these millennial punks apart from their forebears. The Stooges, the Pistols and Nirvana railed against expectations at ever-diminishing distances as the mass media lens zeroed in, but Taylor’s mixed metaphors about being slapped in a fishtank and walking on eggshells are bang on target in Doing In Me Head.
Designed for fist-pumping call-and-response in the moshpit, this is the song that most eloquently describes the culture the modern rock band is surfing: a toxic soup of “big tech” and “the gen that were fed by a spoon”.
Amyl and the Sniffers perform at the Meeniyan Town Hall in November 2023. Credit: Martin Philbey
U Should Not Be Doing That is the one that brings the fight to the edge of the stage. “I was in LA, shaking my shit/ While you were back in Melbourne saying ‘F--- that bitch’,” Taylor sneers in a long list of similar collisions of action and outrage spanning Tokyo to Sydney, Tassie to London.
All the personal abuse and reproach obviously hurts enough for the singer to spend such a large chunk of time addressing haters in what should, given the achievements of their last few years, be a backslapping victory lap for her band. “I know my worth,” she declares indignantly near the end of U Should Not Be Doing That. The next track is pointedly titled Do It Do It.
But even if she allows the negative squirter-jerkers of the internet to frame the narrative in the opening track, by the last scene the new punk heroine has fully reclaimed the power and set course for the next leg of global conquest hurtling through the UK and Europe as we speak.
Me and the Girls just wants to have fun – and free napkins, and abortion and wax; to get drunk at the airport and crawl home with “a bag of chippies and a snack”. Meanwhile, “You and the boys can shut the f--- up”. Press send, and block.
Cartoon Darkness is released on Friday, October 25
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