Amyl and The Sniffers are ready to take on all comers
Cartoon Darkness – the third album from Australian rockers Amyl and The Sniffers – arrives with a bruising attitude, swinging punches and slinging one-liners like sharpened javelins.
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Three albums, global touring, and relentless media coverage haven’t exhausted the Melbourne-founded four-piece. Gnarled, rumbling distortion and some thunderous riffs signal the direction things are going to go on album opener Jerkin’. Though Iggy Pop made an entire career from his sinewy, bare-chested onstage appearance, a woman in a punk-rock band wearing a string bikini and high heels on stage is somehow still something about which certain men feel the need to have an opinion on.
Amy Taylor has no time for this nonsense – epitomised by Jerkin’s typically unapologetic opening line, “You’re a dumb c**t, you’re an arsehole”. It’s a theme she comes back to again on U Should Not Be Doing That – which serves as the ultimate takedown, and an anthem for every woman who has had the talk about having to wear a skirt, cover their knees, tone down their outfit and themselves (and nearly every woman has heard this at least once).
It’s a typically forthright and incisive message for a band that has been on a whip-fast rise in eight years since the friends formed a band in the bayside Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, where they originally bonded over performing at house parties.
The band’s 2021 second album, Comfort To Me, saw them elevated to the ‘next big thing’ category outside of their homeland, earning support slots with megastars like Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins. And when it came time to record the follow up last year, LA seemed like an obvious place to begin – not least because it would provide ready access to industry resources they could only dream of back in Australia, but also because Taylor and guitarist Declan Mehrtens had recently moved to the entertainment capital of the world.
Declan Mehrtens of Amyl and The Sniffers. Image: Danysha Harriott
Home Is Where The Heart Is
As it happens, Mehrtens is actually back in Melbourne when we speak to him (“I come back for my mum’s birthday”), and he confesses that there was never a plan to go ‘LA’ with Cartoon Darkness. “We can’t shake the Australian thing, not that we would ever try to. We’ve become this Australian band with the resources of a Los Angeles band, I guess. The album was mastered by Bernie Grundman, who did everything from Spanish Flea by Eric Benet to Thriller by Michael Jackson and Purple Rain by Prince. Because we lived in LA, it was only a 20-minute Uber to his studio.”
The punk DIY ethos has been part and parcel of Amyl and The Sniffers from the start – as much by necessity than anything else – but the increased resources gave them the flexibility to, well, flex a bit.
“It was like, ‘all right, we’re serious’. We’re part of the industry now, you know,” he explains. “We recorded in the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 and we pretty much had access to any of the things the Foo Fighters did, so we had their engineers and their equipment. We had the Sound City consoles that Nevermind and Rumors and Tom Petty recorded on. We were on the stage that these really large artists had been on, but the experiment was like, ‘What would it be like if the stage was given to an Aussie pub band?’”
The question is answered with the eclectic mix of upbeat funk, snarly punk, and empowerment anthems on Cartoon Darkness – which melds their aforementioned heavy Australian pub-rock influences (Cold Chisel, AC/DC) with a pop sensibility that borrows some attitude from Prince. It isn’t going to please every listener, despite the breadth of musical influences (Taylor is a big fan of hip-hop and R&B), but it might draw in a wider circle than the original Amyl fanbase of yore.
Despite holding one of the finest social media handles around – he’s @dickheadofficial on Instagram if you were wondering – Mehrtens concedes that he barely uses social media beyond using it to keep up with news from back home. It’s a condition that makes him somewhat oblivious to the keyboard warriors who fuel Taylor’s righteous fury on U Should Not Be Doing That – regardless he’s always ready to back her when she wants to clap back.
“Amy fires this song out, and I go, ‘Yeah, whatever, I support you Amy,’ he reflects on the song’s genesis. “I’ll stand there and play guitar while you take fire at whoever.”
Image: John Angus Stewart
Go Explore
When it comes to guitars, Mehrtens is rarely seen without his trusty Gibson Explorer in hand – it’s a rock ‘n’ roll guitar for a rock ‘n’ roll band, and understandably the bedrock of Cartoon Darkness.
“The Explorer that I play live is what I use on most of the album,” he says, “except that I had a P-90 in the bridge, which I don’t use live. My friend Nick Sheppard was in a punk band in the 70s called The Cortinas, and he played with The Clash [between 1983 and 1986]. He told me the P-90s into a Marshall was the best sound for punk. So, I tried it out and I liked it. But live, I just need more power, so I’ve gone back to humbuckers live.”
Mehrtens says they “didn’t try and do anything crazy” when it comes to the guitar sound on the new album. “We weren’t trying to revolutionise my sound or anything, but the Foo Fighters studio has a lot of instruments, a lot of amps, and they have a crazy amount of gear. So, we tried everything that they had there, and we found this Hiwatt amp [custom made for Studio 606 by Hiwatt, most similar to a Hiwatt DR504] to be the best for what I was doing, and now I use that live. The last two albums, I used Marshalls, but a lot of our music is very picky and single note, so with the Hiwatt amp, it sounds cleaner but still really aggressive.”
Another fairly substantial and unconventional change was made to the sound however – and it’s one that’s got a lot more in common with jazz than punk.
“This album is almost exclusively with flatwound strings,” he reveals. “Which was something that isn’t really done in our genre of music. I met up with Matt Sweeney, who does those Guitar Moves videos and he took me to a private beach in Malibu. We were looking out at the ocean, and he’s talking to me about guitar strings. He told me all the 60s recordings were done with flatwound strings, and that I should try it.”
It was revolutionary, especially in the writing process, Mehrtens insists. After the initial month of writing demos in early 2023, the band reconvened in full between January and March to flesh out the remainder of the songs before heading into pre-production with producer Nick Launay (L7, IDLES, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Anna Calvi, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds).
“Because they’re flatwound, they don’t hurt your fingers as much, and they stay in tune a lot better,” he reveals. “So, when it came to writing, I had a lot more stamina to play for hours and hours, because my fingers never hurt, you know. They sort of shift your tone from being a focal lead instrument to more of an instrument that’s a member of the band.
“If you were a rhythm guitarist and you didn’t have any lead lines, I would really recommend using flatwound strings, because the harmonics of the strings don’t clash with the more focal frequencies that a vocalist would have, or a lead instrument would have. When it came time to doing lead guitar lines, as soon as I brought out a roundwound string, then I would be able to sit atop of the music a lot better.”
Image: John Angus Stewart
Bring The Noise
There’s also a rare opportunity for Mehrtens to really stretch himself as a soloist on the track Pigs – but it’s not something the band do particularly intentionally.
“The initial idea of the solo is not knowing what to do next when we’re writing,” he admits, “And it ended up being beneficial to Amy, to give her a breather. Pigs is one of the very few tracks on the album that was done in the tracking process. Most of the solos were overdubbed, but that solo was done while tracking drums and bass. Nick [Launay] wanted to edit it to be as refined as the others, but I wanted to keep it as it was. He boosted the treble a lot to get it to how it sounds now – but it was inspired by Thunder And Lightning by Thin Lizzy.”
More so than past albums, there’s a sense of funk driving some of the tracks on Cartoon Darkness – particularly on U Should Not Be Doing That. Mehrtens sounds delighted that Prince is referenced in relation to this track.
“We recorded at Studio 3 in Sunset Sound, where Prince recorded in the 80s,” he enthuses. “In terms of funk and dance, we’ve realised that we love that, and Amy really loves it, so we’ve leaned into it. We have to impress her. Amy responds mostly to the rhythm and the groove because she’s not a vocalist from the traditional melodic background. We write the riffs for Amy to sing on top of, so we have to impress her, I guess. You end up being creative when you’re this far into it, to sort of get Amy excited about the music.”
She’s not the only one getting excited about Cartoon Darkness – for Amyl and The Sniffers, by the time they’re back in the studio after “a few more years” on the road, they might have even more famous fans.
Cartoon Darkness is out 25 October on Rough Trade
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