Amyl and The Sniffers Play It Softer

Some voices feel as if they’ve been specifically honed to put those who hear them at ease. As our scheduled Zoom call tries to connect one midweek afternoon in late September, Amy Taylor’s Aussie drawl ripples through my headphones before her face ever appears on my screen. Immediately, I can hear within it the smile she’s wearing. As the frontwoman of the vociferous, brilliant Amyl and The Sniffers, Taylor is an overcharged bundle of energy, bouncing about on stage, throwing punches and karate chops at the air, and otherwise inducing her crowd into a state of hyperactive rowdiness to match her own. But, in conversation, she is a soft presence—a warm speaker who smiles a lot and is easy to chat with. She appears on the screen and we exchange pleasantries, and, within the minute, her friend and bandmate Declan Mehrtens joins us, too.

It had, on my end, been a stressful few days in the build-up to this call. Hurricane John had just ripped through parts of southern Mexico, a little west of where I was staying at the time, with more destructive power than had been initially anticipated by meteorologists, who, as the world’s oceans heat up, are increasingly struggling to predict the severity of such storms. In the other room my girlfriend was laid out in bed, aching and agitated, as dengue worked through her system, itself an infection on the rise because of climate change. I was not in an especially tranquil mood, then, preparing for this interview, which was made all the more tense by the possibility that another power outage, which had become a recurring nuisance since the storm hit, might sweep through the area at any moment and terminate the call before its time, wasting Taylor and Mehrtens’s respective afternoons and leaving me without a piece to write.

It occurs to me, as I hear my own words to the pair, both of whom are very understanding about the situation, veering into a gentle, rambling panic, apologizing for having already rearranged our call and preparing them for the possibility that I may yet be cut off today, that my state, in that moment, is rather in tune with the album we’re on the line to talk about. Anxiety, induced by the constant hum of climate disaster and an over-reliance on the internet: these are among the major threads running through Cartoon Darkness, Amyl and the Sniffers’ third LP (out 10/25) and, maybe, their best. “During this album there were so many thoughts swelling in my head,” Taylor tells me, after I point toward the circularity of my doom-weighted mood and the record’s themes.

“We’re at the cusp of AI—it’s only still the early days. Our dependency on social media, especially musicians and anyone who’s creative or anyone who’s got a business. It’s like our lives are dictated by what the algorithm is happy to share with people.” What the algorithm is happy to share, she goes on, is so often despair-inducing. “We’re getting bombarded with stress. You’re connected to the world, and you’re seeing the genocide in Palestine, for example. We’re trying to do something about it, but it’s ignored. And then you talk about climate change and the effects of that—it’s all mixing together.”

Contemporary life, as Taylor points to, can be an overstimulating, strung-out grind, where overworked people are too tired, too poor, and too angry to ever really think straight and relax. Even our downtime, when we get it, is largely mediated by algorithms that feed us content to provoke outrage, be it harrowing news reports, highly partisan political propaganda, or on-the-ground videos of horrors shot in faraway places. Cartoon Darkness is, in some ways, a response to this angsty, tech-powered reality, but its great feat is to acknowledge the anxiety without feeding it. The album is cartoon-bright, bad-mouthed, and very, very funny. “I’m trying to use the pleasure and the fun and the silliness,” Taylor says. “This album is trying to lighten some of the weight so that people can be refreshed to think about [the serious] stuff.”

When Amyl and The Sniffer’s last album, Comfort To Me, was released in 2021, the world was still jammed in place by the pandemic and countries were warily swinging in and out of lockdowns. By the time we began edging back towards something like normal life, the world had changed irreparably and we were, suddenly, years older than we felt. The weirdness of what happened has been difficult to process, but there is a sense, in Cartoon Darkness, that Amyl and The Sniffers are getting there. “The pandemic in Melbourne, where we were living, was the longest lockdown in the world,” Taylor says. “I feel like, in a lot of ways, the city is still recovering. It’s like everyone’s woken up and they’re older. They’ve woken up and all of a sudden they’re 35, and the life that they thought they might have hasn’t happened yet.”

Transitioning, as both I and the members of Amyl and The Sniffers are doing, from one’s 20s into their 30s can be tricky enough at the best times, but losing those years to COVID has made things even more fraught. The pre-2020 world, at least for the more fortunate of us, was still tinged with hope, even as Donald Trump sat in power and the climate’s deterioration started to become more apparent. There was a vague feeling that things might get better, which, today, in a world of worsening climate disasters and live-streamed wars, can seem quaint and hopelessly naive. Young people today mourn for lives that once were promised to them but have since been ripped away. At its most tender moments, Cartoon Darkness speaks to this sense of loss, to the melancholy of losing one’s own imagined future. It’s there even when such lofty themes aren’t being directly addressed, as in one song called “Bailing On Me.” “Yeah, that song,” Taylor smiles, encouraging Mehrtens to speak about it. “Declan, you want to talk? I’ve been hogging the mic.”

“That song is very Spanish-inspired,” Mehrtens picks up. “When I wrote it, I tried to do a flamenco sort of thing—it was inspired by a sexy Spanish girl. There is a bit of longing, I guess. From Melbourne to Barcelona is a long way, so there’s a bit of longing involved. But then we changed it up a bit to make it an Amyl and The Sniffers’ song and we passed it onto Amy, who took it into another realm.” “It’s worth pointing out,” Taylor adds, “that Declan wrote most of this album, whereas Gus [Romer], the bass player, wrote most of the last album. Gus is definitely more, angry punk dude, and Declan is actually, privately, a bit of a softie. So the two softer songs, first and foremost, came from Declan. But then for me, I listen to a lot of country music and I’ve been enjoying a fair bit of pop stuff. Like, Lana Del Rey and shit. Fuck, yeah.”

It would be a stretch to describe Cartoon Darkness as a poppy album, but pop’s preoccupation with love does shine through in parts. “Love and romance,” Taylor says, “especially in punk and heavy music is often put aside as something to joke about, something that’s weak. But I think that’s all there is. That’s all there is in the world, you know? Connecting with other people.”

It can feel trite to point out that, in the wake of a years-long pandemic in which we weren’t allowed to touch nor stand within a few feet of each other, connecting with others is a powerful thing. But it is, and Amyl and The Sniffers, whether through the small number of soft songs on the new album, or through their harder material, facilitate human connection. And, to be clear, my personal fascination with their new explorations of melancholy and gentler sounds shouldn’t be misunderstood as a signal that the band have abandoned their hardcore, crunchy roots. They’re still heavy. They’re still lewd. They’re still angry. Love, after all, isn’t the only thing that binds people. “Rage is such a good reaction to feeling disempowered,” says Taylor. “It’s a way to reclaim power. If someone was getting attacked and their response was comedy, that probably wouldn’t go down so well, you know? Lots of different minority groups are getting attacked, so rage is an appropriate response.” She smiles for a moment. “It’s also really fun to feel rage.”

So, on Cartoon Darkness, we get it all. We get rage, angst, love and loss, expressed through a band who are getting a little older and a little better as they go. Amyl and The Sniffers’ music, whether consciously or not, has begun to speak on behalf of a generation of people seeking stability and joy in a world of increasing imbalance. They are annoyed, a bit anxious about it all, but determined to find some fucking joy and connection as they go. Their audience feels the same way.