Amyl And The Sniffers might’ve made their bones as a boozy Aussie bar band, but years of hard touring has broadened their horizons. Ready to unleash terrific third album Cartoon Darkness, Amy Taylor and Declan Martens explain how they’ve learned there’s nothing mutually exclusive about making your mark and having a rip-snorting good time...
“Jeeeesus…” Declan Martens rubs his eyes, spilling out of bed and into an interview. “I just woke up!”
There are about 8,000 miles between Los Angeles and Melbourne and, on a sunny morning in September, it looks like Amyl And The Sniffers’ laconic legend of a guitarist is feeling every one. Jetlag is a bitch. It’s a lesson Dec and his bandmates have learned the hard way over the past decade. Right now, just a few days removed from a hometown show back in Australia at the iconic, 900-cap Croxton Bandroom, then the long flight back to his new place in the States, it’s really biting him in the arse.
“I didn’t come here to find a new home,” he shakes himself awake. “It’s definitely been a career-oriented move. One of the big things I remember from when we were leaving was everyone saying to us, ‘Don’t become too LA!’ But we couldn’t shake our identity as Australians if we wanted to. I’m here, but people assume I live somewhere else. You can’t hide this accent. When I was back in Melbourne, it felt like home. But it also felt too small for what I want to do with my life.”
This is just the calm before the storm. Bed-headed he may be, but Dec reflects on the whirlwind journey his band have been on with easy-going intelligence, rolling his answers over before spitting them out. Then Amy arrives.
As anyone with their finger even close to the pulse of modern rock will already know, the marvellous Ms Taylor is Amyl's livewire vocalist, with whom Dec and bandmates Bryce Wilson (drums) and Gus Romer (bass) have announced themselves to the world: a blonde-haired, blue-eyeshadowed, scantily-clad force of nature. And though dressed down for our early-morning engagement, she bombs in with an exuberant “Hello! How are ya?!” – and off we go.
“I grew up in a small town called Mullumbimby,” Amy picks up where Dec left off. “When I was about 18, I moved to Melbourne. Back then, Mullum’ felt like a really small town. But over the years, Melbourne has come to feel like that small town, too.”
Having spoken recently about feeling “lost” in Australia’s biggest urban area, she unpacks the baggage that’s built up. “Being there felt limiting in a lot of ways. Geographically, it’s so far from the rest of the world. Trying to maintain friendships and relationships while we go through all these seasons of travel can be a struggle. And, although it’s somewhere we’ve had heaps of support and people rooting for us, there’s also a small-mindedness where others were critical and judgemental and unsure how to respond to what we were doing. I began to feel like I couldn’t be myself there. There was just this heaviness. I don’t want to have any ceilings on my life, and I don’t have to. I don’t have to look after anyone. I’m healthy – which means it’s alright to be in America. I’ve got a visa. And I’m in a band. So, fuck it! We’re young. We’ve wanted to go for a while. So let’s live it up while we’re able!”
A little living it up has been hard-earned at this stage. Last time we sat down with Amyl to talk up a new album, they were in the depths of lockdown, restless as dogs in a cage. Before and since, they’ve been non-stop, making and promoting 2019’s barnstorming self-titled debut and 2021’s more thoughtful, albeit no less explosive, Comfort To Me.
Imminent third album Cartoon Darkness is a chronicle of how far they’ve come, in many ways. Shifting chief-songwriting responsibilities from hardened punk-rocker Gus to the rock’n’roll-loving Dec has ramped up the scale, sonically. And, by her own admission, Amy tends to reflect back the vibes given off by her band. Going on the road with and getting to befriend heroes like Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Weezer and Foo Fighters hasn’t hurt, either. But the clash of lyrics between the anxious, faintly melancholic Big Dreams (‘Another birthday and another year older… You wanna get outta here!’) and the far more driving Going Somewhere (‘I know that I’m going somewhere / Will you come there, too?’) lays fairly bare an internal dialogue about what the future holds.
“As a songwriter, my lyrics are always just a reaction to the environment around me,” Amy says. “That’s all I can do. I feel like my environment is pretty unique and bizarre in a lot of ways as a touring musician: someone who’s come from a punk scene and evolved into bigger venues; someone who understands what that experience is like. That understanding is woven throughout. It’s an album with a lot of dreaming and desire. Wanting something that’s just out of reach but still stretching to grasp it.” An eye-roll at her own earnestness: “Blah! Blah! Blah!”
“My view of the world – my perspective, my experience – has changed”
That dismissiveness is misplaced. With echoes of everyone from L7 and Bikini Kill to Iggy Pop and Queens Of The Stone Age, Cartoon Darkness has the substance and swagger to put Amyl amongst the most important acts of this generation. Given all they’ve achieved, though, was a prerequisite for making this record that they already felt like bona fide rock stars?
“Yes,” Dec deadpans simply, not missing a beat.
“We were coming off a long flight really early in the morning the other day,” Amy follows up with a grin. “I said to Declan, ‘Do you think I’m famous enough now to get away with sunglasses in the airport?’ I looked around and he already had his sunnies on, like, ‘Mate, I’ve been famous enough for years!’”
“I’ve been called stupid more times than I can count!”
It’s the kind of recollection that would have most ‘rock stars’ licking their wounds or foaming at the mouth, but Amy shrugs off the slight with remarkably few hurt feelings. Because she’s not stupid. At all. Smart enough, in fact, to understand the inevitability of both low-burning dullards and pretentious high minds trying to shoot her down for being exactly the person she was born to be.
“It’s crazy how often I’ve been told, ‘Stop singing about politics and stick to singing about pubs!’ Verbatim. But I don’t mind, really. Because my intelligence flows through a crude mouthpiece. Literally. And a lot of it is down to the scattershot way that I communicate: loads of ‘ums’ and ‘I thinks’ and ‘uhs’.
“Of course, I’ll never be perceived as an academic. But the way that I dress onstage affects it, too. Lots of people don’t want to see women expressing themselves via standard beauty norms: make-up, playing with your hair, being feminine. They don’t want to see femininity as intelligence or strength; they want to see it as stupidity or something only appreciated through [the male gaze]. But there are a lot of different levels to intelligence, and people can be many different things at once. And just because someone ‘looks’ super-intelligent doesn’t mean they actually are! It all comes back to that old saying: ‘You should never judge a book by its cover!”
Try to judge Cartoon Darkness by its loud-and-proud cover: a photo of Amy flashing her chest while the boys give their best ‘football hooligan’ impression around her. You’ll get its bolshy attitude, but little of what’s going on beneath the surface. So what exactly is Cartoon Darkness?
“That lyric, ‘Driving headfirst into cartoon darkness,’ has been kicking around in my head for a while,” Amy explains. “It’s a trippy way of viewing the world. With everything that’s going on, particularly post-COVID – cynicism and politics, genocides and war, social media and AI all poured into one big bowl – sometimes, it seems like the future is destined to be dystopian darkness – but it’s still just a sketch, not set in stone! It’s like the future is this childlike thing, full of possibility, sure, but also scary, with all these unseen snakes and things crawling around in the shadow. The present is much more fleshed-out: dystopian and chaotic, but full of wonder and beauty and fun.”
“It sometimes feels like the future is destined to be nothing more than dystopian chaos”
Previously, Amyl And The Sniffers have been less broadly-focused, looking to local or personal inspiration. Dec and Amy agree that learning to observe the changing environments out on tour – “always being the away team” – has changed their worldview immeasurably. There’s still a gleeful crassness to songs like Jerkin’ (‘Every time you talk you mumble, grumble / Need to wipe your mouth after you speak ’cause it’s an asshole / Bumhole, dumb c**t!’) and the lived-in experience of brilliant anti-misogynist anthems like Tiny Bikini or Me And The Girls, but there’s context now, too, of not literally being stuck in a rut, and truly realising the universality of running themes.
“When we started out I didn’t really consider politics or have big opinions about stuff,” Amy nods. “I was kinda feral, without too much critical thinking. I didn’t even really wash my hands with soap ’til COVID! I think it’s normally the opposite where people are smart before they get in a band and [it wears them down]. Instead, I’ve been getting smarter, feeling more empathy and being surer of my opinions as we’ve grown. Seeing so many different things makes me hungry to understand!”
Legitimately so enthusiastic she’s almost out of breath, Amy stresses the difference between “being political” and “being a politician”. There is a level of responsibility that comes with being an avowed spokesperson which she’s not willing to allow to interfere with speaking her mind. But in 2024, absolutely everything is political, especially if you’re unwilling to be cowed in your beliefs.
“A lot of our music is about bullshit nothingness,” she says. “There are songs about getting kicked out of a pub; love songs; random shit. But all of that is still super important. I’m a woman with a lot of fight in me, but I don’t want that to rob other women of seeing [one of us] experiencing joy onstage, or to [devalue] the act of getting up there to sing about love. Because love is so important. At the end of the day, it’s our whole world: relationships with other people.”
Unstatesmanlike as some of Amy’s lyrics can be (‘Keep jerkin on your squirter… wank wank wank!’), there’s a power in righteous rage that should never be discounted for vulgarity, and a reminder of the unkempt, imperfect, ultimately volatile human beings that we all really are.
“That’s so true,” she laughs. “Sometimes when you are angry, it’s fuckin’ ridiculous. You get road rage and the stuff coming out of your mouth is like, ‘Die, you c**t!’ It’s stupid. And, to some extent, those heavy emotions should be laughed at. But you also shouldn’t try to file those rough edges away, because they connect us all. Whether you’re in a band or anyone else going about your life out in the world, people make so many binary expectations and judgements of you: good or bad, ugly or attractive.
“And in the online sphere there are so many more layers that I don’t want to imagine being young nowadays. You’ve got all these age groups mixing, with 60-year-old men judging 15-year-old girls. One mistake and you’re marked forever. But we’re all human. No-one is the finished article. We’ve all got growing to do. And mistakes are part of normal life. People are inherently good much more than they’re inherently bad. So, if we give ourselves that space to get things wrong and learn, open things out and uplift each other, then shit will be poppin’!”
“Oi! Are you laughing at me?! You bastards!”
Uncomfortable self-consciousness is, as always, refreshingly absent from Amy’s meditations for most of our conversation today, but it leaks in as we roll towards the end. We aren’t laughing, of course, but grinning in something like awe as the singer admits she’d love her life to be more like Forrest Gump’s: a series of disparate chapters where she never gets bored.
“I can’t wait for you to be a shrimp fisherman, Amy!” Declan teases, mischievously.
“I’d be a shrimp fisherman!” she bats back. “I want to maintain the space to be able to explore different parts of myself. Becoming one of those stadium bands we’ve spent time on the road with – having a career that’s all-consuming like that – isn’t something I think I’d be comfortable with. Maybe that’s to do with being a frontperson. The whole time I’ve been in the band, if not intimidated, I’ve felt the growing pains. When we started, the biggest shows I’d ever been to were like 200-cap. But then we were immediately growing bigger than that. From an industry point of view, and a live performance point of view, that can be a lot of stress.”
A pause, to consider whether she’d really forego fame and fortune. “Not that that’s a hard no to being one of those massive bands. More of a long-winded, ‘I don’t know.’ I’d definitely give it a crack. Basically, I want to be in Amyl And The Sniffers, but also to be a shrimp fisherman – and to run a bank!”
The guitarist can’t help but keep winding his singer up: “Did you say rob a bank?!”
Having already hit the musical jackpot, you’d think there’s no need. Success is a double-edged sword, however, and having left home behind in search of some sort of fame doesn’t mean they’re any close to making their fortune. Amy reckons the only way to land a windfall would be, “something humiliating, like, I don’t fucking know… being in an ad for orange juice!” And low record sales, stingy streaming services, hefty venue cuts and the good old cost of living don’t help.
“It is a double-edged sword,” she nods, “but the pokey edge of the sword doesn’t make me want to stop. Plus, I’d complain anyway, no matter what job I was doing. So it may as well be something as sick as this.”
Other rewards have been there to reap. Creatively, this album has seen Amyl branch out. Dec explains they’re at a point where they’re “ready to explore” but not yet where they “need to experiment”. Striking break-up song Bailing On Me, for instance, started as the guitarist’s attempt to write something “horny” inspired by a girl he liked on Instagram, but became more bittersweet as the band took hold. Working with veteran producer Nick Launay was another boon: his experience of Australia and working with Aussie artists INXS, Midnight Oil and Silverchair keeping them grounded on the wrong side of the Pacific. The in with Foo Fighters saw Dave Grohl make the historic Studio 606 available, too, replete with genre legends like Minor Threat/Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye and Nirvana/Foos guitarist Pat Smear just hanging around.
“It’s funny,” Dec laughs. “We were in this great, high production studio, but they gave us mates’ rates which meant it was also the most affordable. Being there, the project took on this idea of ‘What would happen if you gave this Aussie pub-rock band the same tools as Foo Fighters? What could they do?!’ What we did in there – as we would on a Foo Fighters stage – is we stepped up to the plate. Like, we’re not used to playing Fenway Park at 5:30pm. But we will!”
Experience is everything. Ultimately Amyl And The Sniffers want to incorporate them all into a bigger picture. Case in point: how lead single U Should Not Be Doing That checks off a travelogue of glitzy destinations, from New York to Tokyo, before its final verse harks back to aboriginal sites Naarm and Gadigal much closer to home. As far as A&TS want to go, they’ll stay attached to their roots.
“I don’t want to lose the parts of me that came from Mullumbimby,” Amy says. “And Melbourne shaped us all: it’s where we started a band, fell in love with music and spent our formative years. But this music is about my whole life, and where it will take me. I’m in Los Angeles now, but I just sublease, I don’t have furniture, and I live out of two bags. I’m still figuring it all the fuck out.”
“When darkness comes it’s because there is a light we don’t want to lose”
Aren’t we all? If Amyl And The Sniffers’ younger selves could see them now, they’d share in wisdom won and lessons still being learned. In the end, those are transferable to the rest of us, too.
“Amy calls Amyl And The Sniffers ‘The perfect father-daughter band’,” Dec smiles. “You get all these old punk and rock dudes coming to shows with their daughters who are often completely new to these sounds. I turned 30 a couple of weeks ago, and reflected on how I spent most of my 20s in this band. Personally, I like to think we’re ‘for’ the nerdy, misfit guitar guys like I was at 18 or 19!”
Characteristically, Amy trains her sights bigger and wider. “Cartoon Darkness is for a younger generation who came of age during COVID: kids who don’t know about live shows and feel isolated or unable to interact with the world. But it’s also an album for the dumb bitches who don’t know what they’re doing with their lives, who just like getting drunk all the time and can’t figure it out. Mostly, it’s for the people who’re worried about the world – be that because of economics, genocide or the rise of the computers.
“It’s a light-hearted record, but it’s not about looking away from those scarier ideas. I want people who are entrenched in that stuff to know that this music is for them. Because I am one of those people. Experiencing joy and remembering what the positives are is incredibly important. That’s why we’re worried. Because we care. We like having coffees with our friends. We like vaguely predictable weather. We like not being dead. The reason we worry about the coming darkness is because there’s a light we don’t want to lose. We need to remember that.”
Amy shakes her head and smiles, conscious of veering into heavy territory just as our time runs out. Then another flash of breathless mischief. “Blah! Blah! Blah! Somebody stop me, because I’ll just keep going on!”
Cartoon Darkness is released on October 25 via Rough Trade. Catch Amyl And The Sniffers live in the UK in November, and again next summer supporting Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park. Get your tickets now.
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