‘If you don’t have haters, you ain’t doing it’: How Amyl and the Sniffers became our biggest and brashest export

″Is there anywhere in this world a dream can’t take me?”

Singing on a track named for the tiny bikinis she takes great joy in wearing on (and off) stage, Amy Taylor surveys her potential and zeroes in on her capacity to be, have and do more.

A few weeks before I meet the frontperson of Amyl and the Sniffers and her bandmates in the pine-smelling studio where they wrote their third album, Cartoon Darkness, Taylor was on-stage at BigSound, the annual music industry conference in Brisbane, delivering a blistering and biographical keynote about her life, music and aspirations.

Dressed in a shimmery gold halter top and Adidas trackies, curtains of her peroxide blonde shag blown out, she sketched out her story: growing up in Mullumbimby (where Iggy Azalea’s mum was her soccer coach), working at the IGA, being a kid who “wanted power” and didn’t know how to get it or where to direct her energy. “I wanna start an empire,” she told the rapt audience.

The Sniffers – rounded out by Declan Mehrtens on guitar, Gus Romer on bass and Bryce Wilson on drums – recorded their last album, 2021’s astonishing Comfort to Me, in a storage unit. It was lockdown in Melbourne and they could make as much noise as they wanted, with only the occasional removalist privy to what they were doing.

Amyl and the Sniffers on stage at the Myer Music Bowl last December.Credit: Martin Philbey

That record went to No.2 on the local chart, earned them ARIA awards for best group and best rock album (their second in the latter category), and solidified them as one of our proudest exports. They’ve since opened for Foo Fighters in the US and Green Day across Europe, in addition to slots at the world’s biggest music festivals and their own sold-out headlining tours. Making Cartoon Darkness at Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 in Los Angeles – on the Neve 8028 console that recorded Nevermind and Rumours, no less – was a major step up. We’re not in the storage unit any more.

Being home in Melbourne is not what it used to be, either. “Our relationship with each other has kind of changed a fair bit over time,” Wilson says of the former housemates. “We spend probably six months of the year in each other’s pockets … So when we are all together now it’s pretty much only for a show or something like that.”

Going out, seeing bands and being ratbags was formative to their early years as a band; it’s how they met one another. But visibility has changed the tenor of their movements now. “The four of us going out together means that we’re out as Amyl and the Sniffers and not as friends,” Mehrtens says. Having a rowdy, high-energy reputation and a larger-than-life frontperson has its downsides in social settings, he says. “I think for everyone around us, it gives them a weird sort of idea that they can cross boundaries.”

Taylor describes her group of friends – “two tall brunettes, one of them’s got curly hair; and then a guy with no hair” – who passers-by mistake for the band when they go out.

“It’s like the Aldi version,” Wilson says, laughing.

There’s nothing second-rate about the output on Cartoon Darkness. It’s what a band sounds like when they aim for the stars. The success of Comfort to Me expanded the musicians’ horizons and confidence and sense that, no matter where they go, audiences will follow. So why not go somewhere new?

They all nod when I suggest it’s an experimental record. Taylor namechecks Beastie Boys – who were on high rotation – as well as a “hillbilly element”. “We wanted to change and explore something in ourselves that we knew might be there,” Wilson says.

The trademark squealing riffs are joined by heapings of fuzz, vocal distortions and softer moments. “It’s always been in us to explore softer, melodic, quieter songs, and for Amy to experiment with less screamy energy,” Wilson says.

Taylor had no vocal training before the band formed, and after eight years of near-constant performing with the intensity never dipping below 11, something had to give. She had surgery to remove a painful vocal cyst, brought on by straining and overuse.

“When we were touring a lot I’d lose my voice every night, but just keep pushing through,” she says. “I had to get that removed, but ever since then I’ve had so much more vocal range. I couldn’t talk quietly before. I think that’s where some of the damage was. So if I was to try and talk like this,” she mock-whispers, “it would break. So now I can talk quieter. I can think quieter. Not that I’m going to do any of those things. I can if I want to.”

‘Strangers give us shit, they give me shit. It’s not just online, it’s in real life … There’s nothing you can do ’cause they’d never root for you anyway.’

Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers

Taylor plays with the dynamic quality of her voice on Tiny Bikini to great effect, adopting a girlish sing-song as she teases, “Oh, you think the world is not man enough?/So I’m gonna inject some of this c---.” It recalls Kathleen Hanna, the vocalist of riot grrrl mainstay Bikini Kill, or even Paris Hilton, both of whom deploy Valley Girl vocal fry as if it’s a bazooka, making proclamations about girlhood and femininity through tone alone.

On the single U Should Not Be Doing That, Taylor struts through a litany of real and perceived sledges flung her way. “I was in LA/Shaking my shit/While you were down in Melbourne saying, ‘F--- that bitch’ … I’m in my head/Doing the work … Another person saying I’m not doing it right/Another person tryna give me some kinda internal fight.”

“People love to tell you all the negative stuff that swirls around you,” Taylor says. “Strangers give us shit, they give me shit. It’s not just online, it’s in real life. But I think it’s definitely cultural. Every culture seems to have –”

“Their own genre of shit-talking,” Romer adds.

“– and different versions of success,” Taylor continues. “But there’s nothing you can actually do because they would never root for you anyway … We’ve been in our 20s this whole experience, right? We’re f---ing still very young and people love to judge people in their youth. But it’s like, dude, I was 24 and you are a 50-year-old man on a Facebook group talking about how crap my band is. And it’s like, that’s f---ing weird. You are weird, c---. I’m not weird. You are f---ing weird.”

“The album is trying to inject some silly string into a world that’s struggling,” says Amy Taylor of Cartoon Darkness.Credit: Martin Philbey

She draws a comparison to Star Wars fans complaining about later George Lucas additions to the franchise – paraphrasing the anecdote with a few c-words – as her bandmates agree that, in a world where there are people who hate Elvis and Oasis, it’s impossible to please everyone.

“I love talking shit,” Romer adds. “If you don’t have haters, you ain’t doing it.”

“We are the people who do stuff and they’re the people who talk about people doing stuff,” Taylor says, laying out a manifesto for creativity and blocking out the noise. “I would rather create stuff and make stuff and put myself out there at the risk of judgment … and if they don’t want to make stuff and they want to talk about people making stuff, then that’s what they can do. But I’m still going to make stuff. It’s not going to stop me making stuff.”

The respect and positivity has got louder than the lingering echoes of the Sniffers’ naysayers, too. It is quite literally impossible to watch a YouTube video featuring the band – live performance, interview or music video – and not spot a string of comments along the lines of “I’m a 50-year-old man and this is what rock’n’roll should be!” or “this band has given me faith in the future of music”. Sometimes the praise lands in their laps.

Wilson sorted out some friends with passes to Primavera Sound, a festival in Barcelona, during their European summer run. “I got a voice message from the guy, who said his girlfriend had the best experience of her life. She didn’t know music could look like us, could be like us; carefree and just having fun with it.”

Amyl and the Sniffers are having fun against a backdrop of dread on Cartoon Darkness. The title comes from a lyric in Doing in Me Head, a song chronicling the whiplash experience of “driving head first to natural disaster” with data and the blue light of screens our only comfort.

“The future is really unknown and it kind of feels dystopian right now already,” Taylor explains. “And although all this darkness exists … it’s like there’s a blanket of sickness covering something underneath, which we’re trying to fight for. The album is trying to inject some positivity and some silly string into a world that’s struggling.”

Mehrtens describes the feeling of scrolling every day – from news of a genocide in Palestine “to someone on holiday”. “To Trump,” Romer adds. “It’s impossible to escape,” Mehrtens says.

Taylor moved from “Mullum” – where toxic positivity took the form of “eat organic and buy clean soap that’s made from goat lard or whatever” – to Melbourne, “quite a cynical place”. (She and Mehrtens relocated to Los Angeles in March, which, they say, comparatively is “super positive”.)

Computers operate in strict binaries, she explains, and she’s noticed people’s behaviour on the internet operating similarly: “It’s either good or it’s bad, or you are a good person or a bad person, or you’re a pretty person or you’re an ugly person, or whatever. Computers … are binary as hell. But humans are super-nuanced.”

She’s exploring the middle ground through her music, an outlet where she’s allowed to be upset one minute and express joy the next; can revel in her success on one track and celebrate an airport’s open bar on another.

Finding and holding onto nuance has manifested in a record that’s a reflection of reality as much as it is an escape hatch to somewhere brighter and worth visiting, a rose grown out of cow shit, a victory lap from a band who’s earned this moment.

Cartoon Darkness is out now. Amyl and the Sniffers will tour Australia in January, including stops at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl on January 24, Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on January 25 and Brisbane’s Tivoli on January 31.