Being human

“I'm just going to fucking do something stupid for the sake of doing something stupid, like liberating yourself with a bad decision. It’s not even necessarily ‘I'll go out and get fucked up.’ But like, ‘I'm going to have a tantrum and throw my phone out. I'm going to let emotion overcome me.’”

The rockstar vocalist of Amyl and the Sniffers is giving the background on their song “Chewing Gum”, but she could be describing the band’s whole ethos. Within their scrappy energy, vulgarity and attitude lives a rejection of the seriousness, judgement, and doom of modern living.

Being young and dumb for Taylor is less about age and intelligence, and more about perspective. “‘Young’ isn't an age. It's a spirit”, she says. “The younger generation are also like ‘damn, 22, you're about to die of old age’. I'm 28, and I feel young as fuck. I know 60 year olds who are super young, you know… All this seriousness is suffocating.”

That ethos is heard throughout the band's third record Cartoon Darkness, a smirk beneath the blunt riffs and choruses. You hear it most in Taylor’s yelped lyrics, such as her choice to open the record with the line “You’re a dumb cunt, you’re an arsehole”, mostly just because it’s fun to swear.

Taylor and guitarist Declan Mehrtens call from L.A, where they both now live. With bassist Gus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson, the group began in the Melbourne pub rock scene, playing dodgy backyard shows and clubs. After the flurry of Comfort to Me, slyly recorded away from prying eyes in a storage unit during the lockdowns of 2020, they became one of Australia’s most celebrated bands. Their live shows, carried by Taylor’s huge stage presence, gained fans in Foo Fighters, Karen O and countless others. And though the pair speak of their love for the Melbourne scene, the thrill of a new place feels right.

“L.A. is such a big city, and I feel like I can be way more confident here, and just exist a bit more,” Taylor tells me. “I grew up in the country, and when I moved to Melbourne, I was there for almost ten years. I just wasn't happy there anymore. I could feel the time passing. I was like, ‘Oh, I gotta change it up’”.

Mehrtens points out that his hair is covered in baby oil because he needed to look sweaty in the NSFW video for "Jerkin," by Taylor’s husband, filmmaker John Angus Stewart. They’ve enjoyed these shoots, which are often high-intensity and slightly exhausting, especially when they’re being hosed down or suspended up in wires. The video for “U Should Not Be Doing That” stars Steven Ogg – better known as Grand Theft Auto V's Trevor Philips – playing a grumpy dude who is eventually taken in by Taylor’s lust for life.

“We just moved to L.A. and making it was super scrappy,” Taylor says. “Rick Charnoski pulled it all together. He's an old skater fucking legend, full of energy. We did it all with no permits. We broke into a pool that's a famous skate spot in the Hollywood hills in a random abandoned house. We all climbed the fence. There's fucking tadpoles in the pool and shit. We were driving around, shooting stuff out the back of the car.”

It’s a picture of rockstar living, but the band are more likely to be on a Zoom call promoting the record than partying at the moment. They don’t feel the need to rebel against the reality of being a band in 2024.

“It's just what it takes in this time,” Taylor says. “It's not the nineties where we would be fucking loaded…If you want to fucking be a band, you’ve go to fucking work, you've got to hustle. That's just a trade-off to be doing what we're doing.

“We don't have anything to fall back on. It's not like we have money to burn. The eras of being a fucking dead shit rockstar who can do blow all day and fucking crash your car and shit like that... we've moved through it. It doesn't mean we don't party, but it means we can't party all day, every day. You'd fucking drown.”

The band has just wrapped up their U.S. tour, playing familiar sweaty clubs with Lambrini Girls and stadiums supporting Foo Fighters. “Foo Fighters fans have gotten to this age now where their kids are Amyl fans.” Mehrtens says. “It was a good father-daughter gig.”

“They should have a daddy-daughter day out - sugar daddies are included if they want,” Taylor adds with a massive grin.

You can hear that calculation in the interplay between drums and vocals on “U Should Not Be Doing That”, or their charming Velvet Underground-style balladry on “Bailing on Me”. But they never lose the urgency that got them here. Crucially, rather than rotely aping classic comforting sounds for ageing punks, there’s a constant forward momentum and the shadow of the present moment on Cartoon Darkness.

As well as the excitement of new experiences, the impulse to move to L.A. came from the eyes on them at home. “Tall poppy culture in Australia is fucking real,” Taylor said in a recent keynote speech for BIGSOUND. “I always have felt ashamed of things that are going well. So, what I tried to do is just overcompensate by being as proud as I can.”

Off stage, Taylor is open about how criticism can get to her. “With social media, especially for somebody who has some degree of attention, you do feel like you can't fuck up ever because it's like people will criticise you,” she says.

“I noticed that drinking isn't really a thing amongst the younger generation, and I can understand why. There's all eyes on them all the time. If you're drunk and you make out with your fucking best friend’s boyfriend or whatever when you're fifteen, you're cancelled online for being a house wrecker.”

That rejection of perfection and criticism doesn’t mean the band don’t listen to feedback. Taylor admits that she never used to pay attention to politics, but her time with the Sniffers has changed that. “Even though the album isn't like directly about politics, I think it is, because everything is political and every action is a reaction to the world that we live in,” she says.

The band are direct about their stances at live shows, such as giving $14,000 of merch and door sales to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre at their recent headline Melbourne show. “Even having Lambrini Girls as a support, who are super political, they had to kick someone out because they were saying, ‘keep politics out of music’, and it's kind of like, well, aren’t you here to see us?”

As the band have grown, they’ve also noted their responsibility to keep fans safe. After becoming aware of sexual assault happening at gigs, and even experiencing it herself, Taylor helped set up a safeguarding policy for every show, where security would be briefed. “The bigger it gets, you can't see the audience,” she says. “You don't know what's going on. You don't know the venue. You don't know the security guards…before we go to every show, we have our own security briefing that we advance. We have a zero-tolerance policy, where if there's any sexual assault, the person who's getting accused gets kicked out no questions asked.”

Surprisingly, for an artist whose iconic look is a bikini top and big flexed biceps, she still encounters pushback for how she dresses day-to-day. “I know it’s technically my space but I'm the only one here in a bikini” she crows on “Tiny Bikini”, in a sarcastic sing-song. For one, she sees her outfits as practical. “The shorter the short and the smaller the shirt, the less room it’s taking up in my suitcase,” she says. “If it hasn't got armpits then it doesn't get stinky. So halter neck bikini tops, I barely have to wash them.”

“The way I dress is such an important way for me to express myself and take up space,” she continues. “It's aggressive in a lot of ways, because it’s usually like a male-dominated space, and I'm aggressively female, like, here are my tits.”

“I have to get changed a lot of the time if I want to go out, because what I actually want to wear causes too much hullabaloo. If I don't feel like dealing with that, then it can ruin my day. It’s still just society at large. I kind of live in a bubble, but every time I step out of that bubble I'm like, ‘oh my god, you guys still think like that’.”

Body autonomy and sexism have been unwavering topics for Amyl and the Sniffers since the beginning. “Knifey” from Comfort to Me has become a fan-favourite for its snarling anger at the threat of danger that women and gender non-conforming people experience walking alone at night. “All I ever wanted was to walk in the park / All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars”, Taylor sings - “Please stop fucking me up.” In the song, she pulls out a knife to regain some power, meeting aggression with aggression.

The ethos of Amyl and the Sniffers to be young and dumb could read as nihilistic at first. And while Cartoon Darkness is a bleak picture, with the horror of climate change and big tech especially colouring the lines, the band see it as hopeful. “I guess my reaction to the world that we live in, the way that I react to anything that feels hard, is to put my head down and make it fun,” Taylor says. “Remember that we will drop dead at some point…This is our life that we're in right now, in this moment.”

That’s not to say that living in the moment comes easy. “I personally spend so much time staring at my fucking phone, not in reality,” Taylor says. “With technology and AI, it feels like a race between like that, war, and fucking right-wing craziness. All of that stuff is really out of control. I just want to bring it back to: stuff can be funny. Stuff can just be.”

The band, like many of us, spend their spare time worried about the state of the planet, part of a generation who have been told that the climate crisis is coming since they were children. “Now we’re seeing the consequences of it,” Taylor says. “It can feel really nihilistic because, well, what's the point, right? In twenty years, what's it all going to look like? But it doesn't feel promised to me.

“That's where the title of the album came from. It's a cartoon. It's dark because it's a sketch. This album is trying to make it a novelty and remind us that it is just a sketch, it hasn't happened yet, and not to mourn it.”

Unlike sexism or climate change – where an answer feels more tangible – the record also deals with the panic to engage with everything in front of us, even when we don’t have an answer. There are references to walking on eggshells, of our thoughts not being our own and of outrage connecting big tech.

“Everything feeds the beast, even partaking in activism online, which is super important,” Taylor says. “It’s such an amazing form of communication, globally, but it's feeding the data beast, who are the puppeteers of the moment. They're causing damage, and we're just feeding it more.”

“Even being a musician, the amount that you feed it, it feels like fucking weird. And I don't know what to make of it. A lot of artists come with answers and really big ideas, but I don't have those answers. I feel like a part of the mass going, ‘this is kind of fucking weird’ rather than riding in on my high horse and acting like I know what's going on when I actually kind of don't.”

For all the bluster and earned confidence, Amyl and the Sniffers are fighting against uncertainty and inner doubt. Taylor has become a figure who’s looked to as a voice that can provide some sort of stance against issues far bigger than scrappy punk songs. “I don't know anything really, but I still have opinions,” she says. “It's really hard to get the confidence to voice those opinions.”

When we pick up the conversation again, the Sniffers are back in Australia, getting ready to play their homecoming show at the Croxton in Melbourne which sold out in less than five minutes. Tickets were kept cheap to allow any fans to come. In the meantime, Mehrtens’ phone is blowing up and he’s scrambling to see all the friends he can before he leaves in two days. Taylor is visiting home in New South Wales, swimming and camping before she heads to the city.

Throughout our chat, we come back to dealing with criticism. Taylor remembers seeing a comedian on a “crappy TV show” who was asked how he deals with it. She can’t remember who. But the comedian said that it could be a beautiful sunny day, 30 degrees, and you’ve got a beautiful pool outside with shade and a piña colada. If there’s a shit in the pool you still don’t want to go swimming.

“A lot of people are stopped by the one shit,” she says. “What makes my attitude different is that I'm still getting in the pool. You're like, ‘I don't want someone to tell me how bad I am. I don't want to embarrass myself. I don't want someone to tell me how stupid I am, or how evil I am.’ But that’s not real, anyway.”

Cartoon Darkness ends with two motivational anthems, which capture this spirit. “Do It” is a plea to finish that project you’ve been putting off, to go out and get what you want. “Well it can't be done, no it can't be done / At least that's what they said / But I was climbing up the mountain top / And they were still tucked in their bed,” goes the chorus. And what separates it from selling a sort of rise-and-grind mentality are the hearty performances, where you can hear the band enjoying creating something together for the sake of it.

On “Going Somewhere”, Taylor places dread and optimism next to each other, to acknowledge that you can feel it’s all hopeless and embrace life anyway: “There’s no door to heaven, I don’t think that it exists / And don’t you know the best roses are always grown out of cow shit? / Well that’s it / ‘Cause I know that I’m going somewhere, will you come there too? / And I know that you’re going somewhere / Can I come with you?” She brings us along for the ride.

But perhaps the record’s most optimistic moment comes on “Big Dreams”, a knowingly rough-around-the-edges ballad, Inspired by the many creatives around Taylor when she lived in Melbourne. “When ya get down, oh you’re a lit one / Never been a dull one / Always been a big star,” she sings.

“At the time, I was living in a rental apartment,” she says. “I was touring a lot, but at the end of the day, I still just came home to a one-bedroom apartment with barely any fresh air on a main road. It was pretty boring and depressing.”

“There's a lot of people in my life who are struggling with money. They're all super creative. They're really good at what they do. My experience has been super lucky. I’m very proud of myself and what we've done. But a lot of people in my life are struggling hard. They still have big dreams. They're still chasing them. I guess this my song for them,” she says.

For so much of the new record, Taylor wrestles with not knowing what to say, and still speaking anyway. She’s embracing not knowing everything. “You just lean into your human traits, which is failure”, she says. “Maybe that's what's beautiful”. She has more answers than she thinks.