Amyl and the Sniffers smell glory in 'Cartoon Darkness'

Amyl and the Sniffers have always appreciated any little bit of good news. Even when the Australian punk rock quartet recorded their charmingly raw debut EP, “Giddy Up,” in a single night and released it online in 2016, the initial 100 streams were reward enough.

“For us, that was huge,” says singer Amy Taylor, also known as “Amyl,” with a smile. “We got play on local community radio and thought, 'We're huge. We've done it.' You get a support space in a room that seats 200 people and we say, 'We've done it.' It's really difficult to have a broader perspective than what we can see. …We really appreciate what is happening instead of thinking about what is happening. could “So many things happen.”

Amyl and the Sniffers feel the same way about their third album, “Cartoon Darkness,” released Oct. 25, a potent collection of growling, ecstatic rock tunes and the occasional ballad. Her first single, “U Should Not Be Doing That,” quickly gained millions of streams on Spotify and heavy rotation for its music video (1.6 million views on YouTube alone), which shows Taylor and a new partner hitting the ground running. through Los Angeles as she sings the defiant self-esteem lyrics.

“I'm doing everything I can to make it,” she sings in her distinctively combative, percussive and very Australian voice. “Not everyone makes it out alive / When they're young.”

Fans are drawn to the Sniffers' sound and attitude, which taps into the rowdy spirit of first-generation punk rock, along with a feisty, euphoric blonde singer who moves non-stop and usually dressed in a bikini and shorts. The album arrives two months after the band opened a Foo Fighters concert at BMO Stadium in August, followed days later by two sold-out shows at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood.

“Right now I think they're the best rock band on the planet,” Nick Launay, producer of “Cartoon Darkness,” says in a phone interview. Launay has frequently worked with modern rock groups such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Idles and Nick Cave, but his career dates back to the early UK punk and postpunk scenes.

“If they had existed in the '70s, they would have been just as important back then,” he says of the Sniffers. “They would have given everyone a run for their money.”

Launay says his mission in the studio was simply to fully capture the urgency of the band's live shows. That aside, the new album's 13 songs show a notable evolution in their punk rock sound, which remains connected to their early pub days without getting in the way of growth and the increasing power of their delivery.

“I think we've always had confidence,” Taylor says. “It's just that we've gotten better. Even when we were not very good, we were confident, but now the skills are slowly catching up with the confidence.”

The Australian quartet is gathered on a recent afternoon around a Griffith Park picnic table, where a small pack of toddlers is making noise on the nearby grass. Taylor is dressed in a short black leather jacket, matching shorts, and knee-high boots with stiletto heels. Pinned to his chest is a 2 Live Crew button.

Her three male bandmates are tattooed, scruffy-style rockers: guitarist Declan Mehrtens, drummer Bryce Wilson and bassist Gus Romer. Earlier this year, Taylor and Mehrtens moved to the US and found places in Los Angeles, while the others theoretically remain in Melbourne. That kind of distance between bandmates may seem like a problem for a thriving rock group, but they've rarely been apart this past year, with only brief breaks between album recording, music video filming, a U.S. tour. United and then rejoin in Australia.

“It seems like we've been together this year practically every day,” Wilson says.

Taylor adds: “We see each other all the time. It’s such an international project that we don’t live anywhere anyway.” He turns to Romer and Wilson and adds, “They may live in Australia, but that's where they keep their trash.”

Los Angeles already feels like home for the singer and guitarist. Mehrtens decided to move here after enjoying a Dodgers-Padres playoff game, and Taylor has become friends with local rockers like Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arrow De Wilde of Starcrawler.

They are back on the road for a European tour that kicked off Nov. 3 in Dublin and will return for a North American tour in the spring.

Her work with producer Launay began with the recording of two songs last year on Sunset Sound, including “U Should Not Be Doing That,” released as a single in May. In the lyrics, Taylor pushes back against the detractors she says the band has faced at every turn.

“At the end of the day, nothing really stopped me, and probably nothing will because I like doing it more than what other people think,” Taylor says with casual defiance.

The new album opens with the loud rock riffs of “Jerkin',” as Taylor dismisses the haters with boasts and gleeful profanities: “Last time I checked, I got the hit / 'Cause the losers are online and they're obsessed / Typin'.”

There's also the crazed noise of “Motorbike Song” and the seductive ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone with a melancholic music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart. The clip shows each of the band members on the back of motorcycles riding through an open desert landscape.

Amyl and the Sniffers guitarist Declan Mehrtens poses for a portrait at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

(Steve Appleford)

Up front, Taylor sings from the back of a helicopter, her voice low-key and almost resigned as she laments for those who feel trapped in place: “It's not easy when the city is full of broken hearts / Can you hold on any longer?” strong? ? / Just breathe and get out of this place / I know you can recover.”

There are also hip-hop influences, Taylor says. “The Beastie Boys had a big role on this album,” he explains, “just because they're amazing and their phrasing is great and we listened to a lot of them.”

Along the way, her producer has learned to interpret what he calls the “Amy Language.”

For example, while Launay was mixing tracks for 2021's “Comfort to Me,” Taylor was unhappy with the sound of “Hertz” and called the song mix “too Lambo,” short for the Lamborghini luxury sports car. So he sent Launay a photo of a Subaru doing donuts on the asphalt as a better example to follow. “So,” he wrote, “only driven by an attractive Australian girl… but she is a politician.”

“Even though they seem like crazy instructions, I knew exactly what I wanted to say,” says Launay, who lived in Australia for a decade. “I mixed it rawer, wilder, sexier and put a couple of clever details in it, and I sent it to her and she said, 'Yeah, that's it.' Next!'”

Taylor grew up there, in Mullumbimby, a small village in northern New South Wales, and a town she describes as “dirty hippie, no shoes, like anti-vax, organic food”. Rapper Iggy Azalea is also from there and left for the US when she was 16. Azalea's mother owned a cleaning business that Taylor's mother worked at briefly.

The band began in a house shared by Taylor, Mehrtens, Wilson and former member Calum Newton on the beach in St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. Taylor worked at a supermarket and had purchased a used battery for about $50 that he kept in his bedroom.

Singer Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers poses for a portrait at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

(Steve Appleford)

“We went to live music all the time, five or six nights a week,” Taylor says of her nightlife habits. “There were a lot of house parties and bands playing in the backyard. I did a lot of freestyle rapping at parties. It was my party trick. If it was a house show, I'd say, Can I use the microphone? “Some bands were playing and I would just like to scream.”

That impulse evolved into forming a band. “When we started, we wanted to sound like a B-52,” Taylor says. “But we just couldn't play well enough. So we sound like that. But we liked the aggression of the music.”

As a new group, they were part of a scene of Australian garage bands with contemporaries such as Cosmic Psychos, Drunk Mums and Dumb Punts. Those early club performances were largely attended by an older crowd, no doubt connecting the noise of the Sniffers with their memories of early punk rock. “When we started, we were probably like 80% men over 50, like looking at a fucking dozen eggs,” he says of the gathering of gray, bald heads.

His audience has evolved a lot since then. During her two-night performance at the Fonda, the dance floor was filled with young fans whom Taylor happily describes as “young frothing people, just frothing at life, like rabid foam,” she says with a laugh. “They're excited and they're young and they're drinking for the first time and they have mullets and they're like, 'Yes!' Our audiences tend to be very excitable people, the same way I am.”

One more thing has changed: For most of the band's career, Mehrtens spelled his last name as “Martens,” partly for simplicity but also because he wore Doc Martens boots. He adopted “Dec Martens” as a kind of punk rock alias, like Darby Crash or Pat Smear of the Germs. It has returned to the correct spelling as a sign that the band has lasted well beyond its initial existence as a joke between friends.

“When I did that, I didn't know we were going to put out three, four… albums,” he says of his previous moniker. “Now there are visas involved and I want people to know that it's me who's on the album.”

Being in the band has also changed Taylor's perspective on many things. Now that she's an accomplished lyricist, she pays more attention to the written word.

“I hated books. Now I love reading books and reading all the time,” the singer says, then adds with a laugh: “Before, my God, I only had like 20 words in my vocabulary. Now I have at least a hundred, which helps. “I love phrasing puzzles and trying to express them in a different and enigmatic way.”

Romer chimes in and adds with a smile, “Sometimes she has a big new word and I'm very impressed.”