Amyl And The Sniffers have a UK hit single with Fred Again.. collaboration You're A Star. Here, to mark their singles chart success, we revisit our interview with the Australian band for the story behind Top 10 third album Cartoon Darkness...
The whole music industry might not know it yet, but Amyl And The Sniffers have their sights set on leaving their mark on a business in which they have fought hard for their place. Rising from Melbourne pub gigs to stadium slots with rock titans including Foo Fighters and more, their story is a testament to the power of hard work. Music Week meets the punk foursome, plus UK label Rough Trade and their managers at Sundowner Artists, to hear how they got here and explore the positive messages behind their larger-than-life third album, Cartoon Darkness…
Are you afraid of the dark? Amyl And The Sniffers certainly aren’t. Their third album Cartoon Darkness (due October 25 via Rough Trade) considers the many forces that threaten not only the music industry they operate in, but the world as we know it, and resolves to stick two fingers up and carry on regardless.
“The music industry is struggling a lot,” says the quartet’s singer Amy Taylor, who talks in rapid, sprawling sentences, her larynx racing to keep pace with her mind. “With streaming, live is the only income, and not many people are buying physical [music] or merch, shows are way more expensive and punters don’t have the money to pay for tickets. People can access music for free, and there’s less of a willingness to go to live shows.”
Sat in the Melbourne outpost of Virgin Music Group, where the band are signed in Australia and the US, Taylor is flanked by her bandmates, guitarist Declan Martens, bassist Gus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson, whose soundbites are more sparing.
Taylor acknowledges that the picture she paints is bleak but – and this is the thing with Amyl And The Sniffers – she points to a light at the end of the tunnel. Using fellow hard-touring Aussie punks COFFIN as an example, she talks of “a thriving scene” of bands from Down Under that are touring internationally.
“It’s not dying or anything,” she says. “It’s just that it’s tough, but people can get through tough stuff if they really want to…”
The Sniffers have been hard at it since they formed in Melbourne in 2016, making music in their shared house when they got in from work. Their debut EP Giddy Up was home-recorded and released in 12 hours, swiftly followed by another EP, Big Attraction, in 2017. Equal parts AC/DC and Dolly Parton, they wore mullets and were fans of Aussie pub rock from the 1970s as much as they were hardcore punk and classic hip-hop. A relentless storm of gigging in their home city and its surroundings led to a first trip abroad (they hit Brighton’s Great Escape festival in 2018 for a chaotic mess of a British debut) and a UK deal with Rough Trade. Two albums have since followed, 2019’s breakneck self-titled effort and 2021’s more nuanced and muscular follow-up Comfort To Me.
At a time of rising touring costs and a supposedly shrinking talent pool, not to mention the usual debate over the future of rock’n’roll, they stand as a beacon of hope. In terms of industry recognition, they won Best Rock Album at the ARIAs in Australia in 2019 (when Romer sold his trophy to someone in the pub, who used it as a bong) and 2022, when they also won Best Group. They have played with Foo Fighters (in 2018, 2021 and earlier this year), Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Liam Gallagher and more, while they are due to open for Fontaines DC at Finsbury Park next summer.
“Opening those big stadiums when there’s no one there at all is the weirdest fucking thing ever, but it’s still fun,” says Taylor.
“It gets pretty funny at that point…” says Romer.
“Yeah, it’s like comedy,” Taylor says. “Playing to an empty stadium is fucking funny.”
Geoff Travis, co-owner of Rough Trade, saw their potential early.
“We saw them play, loved every second and went backstage to talk to them,” he says, retracing the steps that led to signing the band. “We are trained by our musical knowledge to recognise a great band and that was what we saw in front of us – a great band with one of the greatest frontpersons in the history of rock’n’roll. What more could one want?”
His fellow co-owner Jeannette Lee says the signing adds to a rich history of the UK picking up new talent from overseas.
“With a band as enigmatic and thrilling as they are it’s a no-brainer,” she tells Music Week. “You see them live and leave the venue on a high every time. The new record is their best by miles and watching them grow has been a pleasure. They’re unpretentious, fearless and proud of their roots, all qualities I admire greatly.”
Simone Ubaldi manages the band with Andrew Parisi at Sundowner Artists. Fittingly, it was on the strength of a live show at Melbourne’s Croxton venue, which Parisi and Ubaldi run, that they started working together.
“Covid years aside, they have been on the road virtually non-stop since their UK debut at The Great Escape, and their reputation has grown steadily because of their incredible live show,” she says. “It was unhinged when they were playing 100-cap sweatboxes and it is epic on major festival stages. Amy in particular, obviously. She’s a performer that you can’t un-see, she burns onto your retinas.”
Ubaldi notes that they have done things the old-fashioned way.
“There was no viral moment, the live show has been the driver of everything,” she says. “They built what they have room by room, tour by tour, year after year.”
It has been a painstaking and painful process. Guitarist Martens has worked out that the band spent eight full days flying in 2023 and Taylor says that breaking even has always been a concern.
“Australian bands have to travel so much further than English and European bands to get to each other, or even get to America,” the singer explains. “For us it was always, ‘You go on tour for four months because that’s what it takes to break even.’ We’ve worked really hard for a lot of years, as lots of bands do, and the shows are getting bigger, so it is equalling out a little better. We have more tricks up our sleeves, more skills to deal with it. We used to tour for four months at a time, six shows a week, whereas now we say we only want to tour for three weeks at a time, so that way we can have rest.”
“We relied on government grants in the beginning and no one got paid, least of all the band,” says co-manager Parisi. “We lost money every tour, but you weren’t losing as much pre-Covid. That’s something that really can’t be understated – the Sniffers could afford to be on the road four or five times a year back then, as a developing act with limited resources, but we’d struggle to do it now.”
Ubaldi says they have been running a very tight ship for years and “scale with caution” is the MO.
“We have an incredibly robust live business now but we’re still cautious about how and where we spend money, because the band carries that enormous financial risk – not the promoters, not the venues and not the ticketing agents,” she says.
Taylor says the band themselves are having a “great experience.”
“We have lots of fans coming, all of them are having a really great time and they love live music,” she continues. “There’s a lot of energy in the crowd and there’s just a lot of love. I feel like you can recognise that there’s lots of people having a tough time with music, but there’s so much life still. And also, at the end of the day, well, it doesn’t really matter…”
Taylor spent a long time considering what is truly meaningful in life while making Cartoon Darkness. Sonically, expansion is most notable in the ballad-like Big Dreams, the surf rock licks of Bailing On Me and the Beastie Boys-inspired vocoder on vinyl bonus track Me And The Girls. Lyrically, Taylor deals primarily in affirmation, expletive-laden one-liners and vivid storytelling. On the glam stomp of single U Should Not Be Doing That, she socks it to her naysayers with lines such as, ‘I was in Tokyo/Showing off my crack/And you told me that I should not be doing that’.
“I guess I’ve got high standards, I want everything to be really, really meaningful to me and [it took time] to find what that meaning was,” she says, reflecting on the writing process.
“I’m trying to be optimistic in a world that feels really pessimistic – actually no, it feels real and dystopian,” she explains. “I feel like the world is on the verge of crumbling, potentially.”
She continues, warming to her theme.
“I don’t know if it’s exclusive to our generation, but it is still how I feel,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Oh, you know, is capitalism going to collapse? Is AI going to be this crazy thing? Is the climate crisis going to happen?’ There’s genocide and there’s a big waking-up, politically. I wanted the album to be like an optimistic feeling of catharsis, of enjoying what we have. All those feelings of pessimism and fear for the future happen because we love the world and being alive, trying new things, having chocolate, fizzy water, a comfy bed, seeing plants and birds and stuff like that. It’s a resistance to mourning the present, because even though the future might not exist, it doesn’t mean that right now it doesn’t.”
Demoed in sessions between Martens, Romer and Wilson at their practice space in Melbourne, where Taylor would rock up in the evenings and sing, the album was recorded with Nick Launay (Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Public Image Ltd, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) at Dave Grohl’s 606 Studio in LA, where Taylor and Martens now reside.
“It was good, we got to play with the desk Nirvana used for Nevermind, Dr Dre’s subwoofers, Dave Grohl’s AVR desk, Taylor Hawkins’ kit, a snare that was given to him by Roger Taylor from Queen…” Martens says. “Actually, did that get used?”
“I don’t think so,” answers drummer Wilson with a smile.
“It was good enough for Queen, I’m sure, but not for us,” quips Martens.
They poke fun at themselves again as we consider how far they’ve come, swapping crummy pubs to brush up against rock heritage.
“Our old house got knocked down, so all the Comfort To Me memories… Gone!” says Martens.
“Dead!” says Taylor.
“I guess they didn’t know that Australia’s greatest 21st century rock band was living there,” Martens retorts, before Taylor cuts in.
“Yeah they did, that’s why they knocked it down!”
Amyl And The Sniffers trade jokes in the way that only a band who have spent years in each other’s pockets can (“What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?” winks Taylor at one point. “A drum machine doesn’t try to fuck your mum!”), but amidst their one-liners lurks a serious message.
Taylor spent a year studying music business in a community college and has strong views on the industry.
“I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, I was working at a chemical company and getting not very good money, so I thought I’d study something and we started the band halfway through,” she explains. “I like being on top of what we do; the more knowledge you can have, the better. I can hold my own and make sure that we’re being looked after alright, which we are.”
At this point, Martens suggests that Taylor herself would make a great manager.
“Hell, yeah!” she says.
For now, such matters are down to their team, who they hold in great affection. Taylor calls Rough Trade “vibe technicians”, while Martens pays tribute to the “emotional support” they offer.
“There aren’t a lot of Australian bands who are doing it as intensely as we are,” he says. “The people at the label understand the demands. My other mates, they’re all tattoo artists and they just think that I get to sit on my bed all day and play guitar. So it’s cool that I can be like, ‘Holy shit, doing all these radio interviews is crazy!’ and someone’s like, ‘Yeah, I know, I’m sorry you have to do it, but it’s my job to make you do it.’”
Taylor’s laugh betrays the energy-sapping promo run they’re on ahead of Cartoon Darkness, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I’m not anti-industry,” she says. “A lot of bands are and I can understand why, but we haven’t had a negative experience with it. A lot of the people we work with are just people who love music who are trying to make money in a world that requires them to have a job, so they’re trying to do that in something that at least interests them. Sure, we’ve had bad experiences, but that’s pretty natural in human interaction.”
When it comes to the many new challenges they’ve faced so far, Taylor says the group have a ‘try anything once’ attitude, but her tone becomes serious when the subject of inequality comes up.
“My whole existence in this world, every job I’ve had, even when I worked in supermarkets or whatever, it’s been the same,” she says. “Getting groped by people and talked down to is not exclusive to the music industry, but I feel like the music industry is less and less and less tolerant of people who are cheeky bastards. Even just in our time being musicians I’ve seen it change – things that used to be radical now don’t seem as radical. Even pop musicians, they actually talk about feminist issues now.”
Taylor is settling into her role as an artist who speaks her mind on the subject too, but she’s intent on making a positive impact more than anything else.
“Women always have a lot of pressure to talk about being a woman, hold the political space, be strong and talk about stuff that’s been hard or bad,” she says. “But I don’t ever want people to stop seeing a woman on stage having fun, enjoying her life and just being free, being able to laugh and appreciate style, dressing up and glamour. I think a lot of people expect me to be able to hold the fort for everybody and I’m happy to, but I also want to do that by saying, ‘Hey, bitches, you can just have fun tonight.’”
Taylor’s last word on the subject concerns how she feels when she sees the impact her words have on people in real time.
“Talking about this stuff at shows makes me feel stronger, and I do it in a way which is inviting, it doesn’t isolate people,” she says. “I don’t really judge people if they don’t know certain things, even though people have been screaming the same things for years, and they could have been listening, but everyone has a different path to get to where they can understand something. We create a space where people can come along and not feel deep shame and embarrassment if they don’t know. They can be like, ‘Okay, I kind of get it.’”
The singer references Knifey, a sludgy, bass-driven Comfort To Me track about feeling unsafe in public spaces, to make her point.
“A lot of men get really emotional during it,” she says. “And I can see that they understand it and that’s really cool, because then the women can just scream along rather than being judged for having painful emotions.”
Evoking an emotional response is important to the band, perhaps more so than record sales and climbing the industry’s greasy ladder.
“When I was watching the Foo Fighters play, I was analysing the set so scientifically, trying to learn their tricks, but then I’d turn around and see some person bawling their eyes out,” says Martens. “And you’re like, ‘Fuck, all these songs have different meanings to people.’ That’s what’s really special about the mainstream. So I’d like that for us, but at the same time, I think those artists probably have a really tough job.”
We ponder, for a moment, whether Amyl And The Sniffers are suitable for mass consumption.
“I don’t know, it seems hard to sell us to the mainstream,” says Martens. “We talk funny – in about 99% of the world we sound weird, and we look weird.”
“And I don’t sing traditionally,” says Taylor. “Sure, there are a couple of songs where I do, but it’s like a toad in a blender having to yell over some solos.”
Whether that description will set tills ringing remains to be seen, but Cartoon Darkness feels like an essential album in 2024 and represents stark progress for Taylor and her bandmates. They say they’re still surprised by how much they’ve grown and before we leave them to prepare for a hometown album launch show at the Croxton, we mull over what their story proves to the music industry.
“It shows that even though a lot of small venues are shutting down and stuff’s really tough, it doesn’t mean that music is just dead, kaput, the end,” posits Taylor. “It is possible to not have to work a normal job and make music and contribute to a community.”
“This shows [what can happen] if you put your passion in,” says Martens. “We were made aware very early on in our career that there’s not as much money in guitar music or any music anymore.”
The last word goes to Amy Taylor.
“Yeah,” she concludes, “If this was the early 2000s, we’d be so fucking rich!”
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