Amyl and The Sniffers' Amy Taylor on finding hope amid dystopia for third album 'Cartoon Darkness' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Over the past eight years, Amyl and The Sniffers have gone from Melbourne’s premier pub-punk band to international rock favourites, their name a byword for blistering riffs, raucous shows, and a gloriously no-filter, no-fucks-given approach (it does come from the Aussie slang term for poppers, after all). Helmed by frontwoman Amy Taylor – a bleach blonde powerhouse of seemingly indomitable spirit – the band have stormed their way across stages the world over, from dingy back rooms to supporting rock titans Foo Fighters on their latest stadium tour.

In the face of such drive, determination, and raw energy, it’s difficult to imagine any chinks in Amy’s bikini-clad armour. But, as she tells us today, calling in mid-tour from her Portland hotel room, people think all too often that they’ve got the ‘Sniffers completely sussed. “Over the last couple of years of living in Melbourne, I actually felt super lost,” she shares, having recently relocated to LA alongside drummer Bryce Wilson. “I was pretty proud of everything that we’ve done – and we do have a lot of people that are rooting for us – but I felt like I had to shrink myself. I just felt like I couldn’t really be myself, and I still feel like that sometimes. I’m super self-assured and I have a backbone – I’ll take down anyone,” she laughs, before continuing: “But at the same time, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, just like anybody else.”

It’s in this spirit of confident, candid imperfection that they made their roaring return earlier this year with single ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’ – the first new music from the band (completed by guitarist Declan Martens and bassist Gus Romer) since second album ‘Comfort To Me’ in 2021, and a song that gives a resolute middle finger to the naysayers and shit talkers. “I was in Naarm, working on my shit / While you were down in Tassie saying ‘flash those tits’ / I was in Gadigal, showing off my flesh / While you were up in Brizzie trying to show me I can’t do it like that,” Taylor chants on the track, the geographical name dropping a nod to her deep affinity with, and simultaneous frustration at, certain aspects of her home country.

“I guess that’s part of the reason why I’m standing so strong and so tall,” she affirms. “Because I think the right people will look up to me and go, ‘Fuck yeah bitch, if she can do it, then so can I’. Even if they don’t like our music, or they don’t like my flavour particularly, they should be competitive with us and go, ‘Fuck it, we’ll do better than them’.”

Well, good luck to anyone trying. Amyl and The Sniffers’ third album ‘Cartoon Darkness’ is their most multifaceted, polymorphic yet. Recorded with producer Nick Launey (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in LA, it retains the signature ‘Sniffers sound while refining their early scrappiness into a more considered, sonically diverse project. “Bryce and Declan said, ‘We’d really like to make something that’s a bit more like a studio album’,” Amy agrees. “We just wanted to push ourselves, to do something different; I hate repetition. A good way to describe us is as ‘experience hunters’ – we just want to experience new things.” And as experiences go, using the very desk that bore ‘Nevermind’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ isn’t a bad one. “Steve Nicks’ signature was on it! So we were like, ‘If this album’s shit, it’s definitely our fault’,” she laughs. Did she leave a calling card of her own? “Oh hell fucking no! Maybe one day… I’m just grateful I didn’t spill any drinks on it.”

“A good way to describe us is as ‘experience hunters’ – we just want to experience new things.” – Amy Taylor

On the one hand, ‘Cartoon Darkness’ is – as we’ve come to expect – packed with full-throttle energy, attitude aplenty, and tongue-in-cheek lyrical zingers (‘Jerkin’’s “You are ugly all day, I am hot always” and ‘Going Somewhere’’s “They say you’re too big for your boots / Well, go and find a pair that fit” being particular choice favourites). “It’s meant to be uplifting and not too serious,” says Amy of these lighter moments. “It kind of seems like every day there’s just a new tire chucked on the tire fire of civil unrest. And I really value the idea of comic relief in order for people – myself included – to be able to continue existing in the heaviness that is this current time.”

After all, you can’t pour from an empty cup, right? “It’s so funny you say that,” she smiles, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a bunch of old sayings, and they’ve actually never been fucking wrong! I just think it’s super important that every now and then, people can take even five minutes to just have a fucking laugh and release some of that tension, so that you can re-step into that [sociopolitical] realm with a lighter heart and a reminder of what’s important.”

Equally as integral is ‘Cartoon Darkness’’ readiness to deal in the more solemn parts of our psyche. While its sometime-playfulness is a reaction to – or distraction from – the dystopia of our contemporary world, there are also tracks on the record on which themes of existential angst, yearning, and unfulfilled potential are poignantly realised. “It’s a dreamer album in a lot of ways,” affirms Amy. “I think [it’s about] the pain of desire, I guess. There’s lots of notes of wanting change, and wanting difference; it’s about the agony of wanting more out of everything, whatever that means to the individual.”

‘Chewing Gum’, for example, is a yelp of frustration at a world that never lets you stop and smell the roses – so you may as well choose to love the weeds between the pavement cracks. ‘Going Somewhere’ and the ballad-adjacent ‘Big Dreams’, meanwhile, are the twin blades of ambition’s double-edged sword. The former, a swaggering, psych-rock self-belief anthem: “I know that I’m going somewhere, will you come there too?”. The latter, Amy describes as “a heartbreaking song”.

“It’s about the promise of being in your twenties and everyone having these big dreams, [versus] the reality of life,” she explains. “I hate to talk about the pandemic, but it stunted a lot of people; in the blink of an eye, everyone woke up in their thirties. Life’s moving so fast – it’s just this hamster wheel of trying to pay the rent and be creative at the same time. And I don’t want people in my life to stop dreaming because I really believe in them, and they’re so fucking good at what their passion is. I just really want them to be able to experience their dreams coming true. Even if it doesn’t equate to commercial success, when they do their fucking thing, it’s priceless to the people that get to witness it.”

“I don’t want to be a politician – it’s not in my nature – but I do want to be political.” – Amy Taylor

‘Cartoon Darkness’, then, is an apt summation of LP3’s dual aspects: moments of technicolour fun in the face of a murky, shrouded future. Lifted from a lyric in album track ‘Doing In Me Head’ – “driving head first into cartoon darkness” – the phrase, to Amy, partly alludes to our world’s head-fucking, destructive current trajectory. “Between the climate crisis potentially coming really quickly, and AI, and just sadness and violence, the future’s super unknown. I feel like we are, as a species, driving headfirst into darkness, but it’s so bizarre and I really just don’t understand it, so [there is] the naivety and sketchiness of cartoons. It’s not even realistic darkness; it feels like a make believe darkness [that] I think we’re heading into.”

There’s no denying that the current state of the world does feel especially bleak. But, we posit, perhaps people have always felt this way? “That’s what I wonder too!” she exclaims. “We look around and go, ‘This is such a hectic time’, but I wonder if people who are 80 are like, ‘Oh, shut up’. I would love to know – is this something that every generation experiences?” She warms up to the topic, theorising that “the way things are evolving is quicker than ever before in history – you know, first it was a toaster, and now we’re like, ‘Let’s get brain chips’. It’s like when people went from fucking walking on trails, eating nuts, to farming or whatever the fuck [happened]. I could definitely be wrong, but I think that we’re kind of existing through that time, and that’s why it’s particularly strange [at the moment].”

And yet, for an album that is undoubtedly – perhaps unavoidably – a product of our times, ‘Cartoon Darkness’ isn’t a political record, per se. Amy is tentative to describe the band’s work as political or feminist, suggesting that if it is received in those terms, that’s not necessarily by design. “Existing is politics; to be a human is politics. But I feel like I’m still a baby in terms of where I am with my political education. I’m trying my best to learn everything I can, but even feminism is something that I only felt confident in learning about – something I kind of dipped my toe into – maybe five years ago. I know my opinion on stuff, but there are people who can say everything so much better, so I just try and platform their voices.” As she writes in an email following our conversation: “I don’t want to be a politician – it’s not in my nature – but I do want to be political.”

And, as she points out, politics and feminism aren’t theoretical concepts; they’re things you live. Tracks like ‘Tiny Bikini’, ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’, and bonus cut ‘Me and The Girls’ are prime examples of such; a set of eviscerating push-backs against tired criticisms of her self-presentation – from both her day to day life, and from within the industry. “I love being scantily clad, and I love being feminine at times, and I love makeup,” she enthuses. “Everybody in theory wants a successful female [who] they idolise and fantasise about and fetishise, but it’s the same old story. They’ll judge us ‘til the cows come home, and then when we drop dead, they’ll be like, ‘Yes queen, you were awesome’.

“I think it’s just bullshit really,” she continues. “You can’t be hyper feminine, and you can’t be ambitious, and you can’t want more than what you have. If you’ve done well, you’re not allowed to say you’ve done well. And it’s just a tired thing that I think people forget is actually still happening right now.”

We may be living in an apocalyptic hellscape – as Amyl and The Sniffers are only all too aware – but ‘Cartoon Darkness’ manages to empathetically acknowledge the state of it all without getting dragged down into the mire. “When we play, everyone’s just experiencing joy and relief,” Amy smiles. “When I’m feeling super down or just confused by the dystopian nature of our current days, and I see a piece of media or art that has that essence [of joy], I feel like I can breathe again. It makes me think, ‘We’re all in this together’. Whether we like it or not, all of us are driving head first into cartoon darkness.”

‘Cartoon Darkness’ is out 25th October via Rough Trade.

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