Amyl and the Sniffers take on the world: ‘If you don’t like us, then that’s on you’

It’s 10pm on a Saturday night in Melbourne and the crowd at the Croxton is getting restless. Burly men in flannels, young women of colour, teenagers double-fisting beers, people with purple hair or grey – all are waiting for the same thing.

The lights dim and the crowd roars. Four figures stumble on to the stage to Fatman Scoop’s Be Faithful. A woman in a halter top, short-shorts and cowboy boots bounds to the microphone. “What the fuck’s up?” she yells. “If anyone falls down, you help them up. Don’t touch anyone. Let’s get rowdy!”

Bodies fly as Amy Taylor prowls, screams and laughs, her peroxide blonde hair falling over her thickly lined eyes; this is the infamous, furious stage presence described by NME in 2018 as “defying gravity, as though she’s possessed”; and by the Observer in 2021 as “a boxer crossed with a wood sprite”.

It’s a homecoming for Amyl and the Sniffers, the high-voltage pub-rock band that have become one of the world’s most in-demand rock acts since meeting as housemates in Melbourne eight years ago. Billy Corgan is a fan – “I looked at her for 10 seconds on stage and I said: ‘Holy mother of God, this is a true rock star’” – and so is Karen O, who has praised the band’s “incredible combo of heart, grace and balls-to-the-wall punk”.

The band has the rambunctious, three-chord essence of Australian legacy rock acts like AC/DC, with the gutsy feminism of contemporaries such as Camp Cope and Body Type. They’ve played their own sold-out headliners around the world and opened for Foo Fighters in US stadiums. Next year, they’ll support Fontaines DC at London’s 45,000-capacity Finsbury Park. This show, their first hometown headliner since 2022, was announced a week prior and sold out in three minutes.

The morning before the show I meet the band at a studio tucked away in an industrial pocket of Melbourne’s inner north – the headquarters of Sundowner, their management company. The Sniffers are all running late, rolling in one by one: bassist Gus Romer, immediately extending his hand; guitarist Declan Mehrtens with his signature shaggy mop; drummer Bryce Wilson, boyish and shy.

Taylor is the last to arrive, fresh-faced in a sand-coloured trench which she removes to reveal a Posseshot jumper (the Melbourne hip-hop collective opened the Croxton show), tights and fluffy white legwarmers. She greets me warmly, her toothy grin wide. For someone whose lyrics contain lines such as “Don’t need a cunt like you to love me”, she’s surprisingly gentle in person.

It’s the first time the band has been together in this space since last Australian summer, when they spent most days here writing their upcoming third album, Cartoon Darkness. Taylor and Mehrtens have since moved to Los Angeles, where the album was recorded earlier this year on the same soundboard as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

All four admit that since the band blew up and this became a full-time gig, they don’t hang out as much socially. But Taylor recently gifted Mehrtens a fart machine, and the banter remains. As Romer puts it: “We’re not friends – we’re fuckin’ family.”

Amyl and the Sniffers’ first EP, 2016’s Giddy Up, was written, recorded and released in 12 hours: short, fast and loud songs unconcerned with perfection. The band started gigging, gaining notoriety as an explosive live act thanks to Taylor’s whirlwind of chaos, bounding around the stage like a punk Energiser bunny. A self-titled debut album came in 2019 and its follow-up, Comfort to Me, in 2021. Their shows got bigger but have maintained the same raw, breakneck energy, as they won over new fans supporting big-ticket bands such as Corgan’s Smashing Pumpkins.

Taylor’s vocals are distinctive and fluid, from rapid speak-singing to jagged melody, all in her broad Australian accent. Her unique voice impressed Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson, resulting in Taylor lending a verse on the post-punk duo’s 2021 single Nudge It. “She struck me as someone who wanted to extend their capabilities,” Williamson says. “She gave Nudge It an almost golden-era rap feel.”

It’s a distinctly Australian sound that had the Guardian’s UK’s music critic Michael Hann reaching for new genre titles: “Oz thug rock”? “Yob-glam punk”? Others find it hard to place.

“People sometimes are like, ‘Oh, I hate this British band,’” Taylor scoffs. “I’m like, ‘Are you fucking fucked in the head?’”

In our interview, as on stage, Taylor does most of the talking. “Amy’s platform involves us playing music behind her,” Mehrtens says. Romer agrees: “We’re a vessel for her message.”

Social commentary is never far from Taylor’s lyrics, which could just as easily contain brutal ragers about life under oppressive systems (Capital) and simply trying to survive as a woman (Knifey) as it could slapstick humour about oral sex (Blowjobs) and the joy of skimpy clothes (Tiny Bikini). When their song Jerkin’, a kiss-off to online trolls, was recently edited for radio, the word “squirter” – slang for a particular body part – was bleeped out. Taylor rolls her eyes. “There’s the state of the world – but then you can’t say the word ‘cunt’. And if I had my tits out, that’s really offensive … Double standards, right?”

The Croxton show raised almost $14,000 through merch and door sales for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. “They are one of those few punk bands that actually embody punk,” says Phoebe Lunny, the guitarist and singer of Lambrini Girls, who opened for the Sniffers in the US and Canada over the North American summer. “They also champion safe spaces and advocate for Palestine at every performance … It’s a commitment to both their pit and using their platform.”

After witnessing sexual assault among their audiences – with Taylor even experiencing it herself – they have begun providing venues with security briefings and printing out signs: “No sexual assault tolerated, no classism and racism, all the crap isms.”

But having grown up regionally, in the small town of Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales, Taylor reserves judgment. “The security guard might live on a farm in Kentucky and shoot animals and eat them – he might not know about, like, identity politics,” she says. “I don’t want them to feel ashamed. I want to use our opportunity to say, ‘Hey, this is something we care about. Maybe it’s something that you could start looking into.’”

It’s been a process of learning for her, too. “I only feel like I became political over the last, like, five years – I really just didn’t understand politics, was intimidated by it, felt like it was beyond me,” Taylor says. “I’m more curious now … It’s something that I want to be a part of.”

Released next month, Cartoon Darkness maintains the band’s scrappy spirit but also evolves their sound, taking in wide-ranging influences. Taylor had been listening to the Australian whistler Molly Lewis, so incorporated some whistling into the chorus of Bailing on Me. The band even goes a little Daft Punk with a vocoder on the genre-hopping closer Me and the Girls. That one’s Mehrtens – the vocoder came in because otherwise “the song sounded too much like Boney M”, he deadpans.

Writing the album was a fast, loose process, with the band jamming out tracks on the fly. “The more you have to play a song, the more stale and less excitement is in it,” Mehrtens says.

Many of these songs are about staying authentic in the face of criticism – which Taylor has experienced plenty of. In her keynote speech at the recent Bigsound conference in Brisbane, she shared some of the phrases that have been slung at her throughout her career: “Goddamn slut”, “bourgeois sellout”.

“It’s tough out there for women,” she said. “But I’m not a pussy and I’ll fight everybody and anybody about it.”

The fight continues on Cartoon Darkness: there’s a middle finger raised to tall poppy syndrome, an Australian tendency to cut down or criticise those who succeed. “I was in LA shaking my shit / While you were down in Melbourne saying ‘Fuck that bitch,’” Taylor shouts on lead single U Should Not Be Doing That, spitting the title phrase in a mocking sing-song. Elsewhere, she laughs off the abuse she’s fielded from men on the internet (“You are ugly all day, I am hot always … You are fucking spiders, I am drinking riders,” she gleefully yells on Jerkin’).

“Life is really short – not to be like Yolo [you only live once] and shit, but like, actually, Yolo,” Taylor says. “It’s like a weight. Which one’s heavier: criticism or not being able to do what I do? To me, I’d rather just keep doing what I’m doing.”

Besides, she’s having way too much fun to listen to joyless purists who think the band have betrayed punk’s ideals by partnering with Gucci or pushing their sonic boundaries. “If you don’t like us because we’ve gone to explore different things and you feel abandoned, like we left your scene or something, then that’s on you for having weird attachment styles, motherfucker.”

On the band’s newest single – the slow-burning Big Dreams – Taylor’s voice takes on a smoother, more tender sheen above a rumbling build. The band all agrees it’s a step out of the comfort zone – “It’s like Crowded House soft rock,” says Taylor. “I just didn’t want to get rid of it, even though it’s super different to Amyl.” Mehrtens, who wrote the riff on acoustic guitar, was initially unsure: “We’re a rock’n’roll band, so I [didn’t] know what to do with it,” he says. “Amy liked it, so she pushed me a lot to figure out how it would go … Even for a soft song, we’re a high-energy band, so we need that energy in there eventually.”

“I’m not much of a sad feeler – I’m more, ‘Get burnt out and get aggro,’” Taylor says. “But I love the idea of romantic melancholy. Declan loves a sad song and Gus does and I’m pretty sure Bryce does, too, so, you know,” – that grin again – “I throw them a bone here and there.”

Aggro and melancholy, light and shade – it’s all here. After all, if the world is ending, you might as well have fun in the wreckage. “It’s a very optimistic record, but it’s not ignorant,” Taylor says. “Yeah, we’re probably going to burn in the climate crisis in 20 years … but I don’t want to mourn everything, because there is so much beauty.”

Amyl and the Sniffers’ songs to live by

Each month, we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death. These were answered by guitarist Declan Mehrtens.

What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?

1980. Hells Bells by AC/DC; Ace of Spades by Motörhead; Hungry Heart by Bruce Springsteen; Magnificent Seven by the Clash; and Could You be Loved by Bob Marley.

What music do you clean the house to?

I like cleaning to Laurel Canyon stuff, and Americana. Gene Clarke’s No Other is a great album to ease the mood and allow yourself to reconnect with the space you live in.

What’s the song you wish you wrote?

Don’t Dream it’s Over by Crowded House.

What’s one song you wish you didn’t write?

Monsoon Rock.

What is the last song you sang in the shower?

Probably Slide Away or Morning Glory by Oasis.

What is your go-to karaoke song?

Khe Sanh by Cold Chisel if I’m in Australia, otherwise Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis.

What underrated song deserves classic status?

Many Men (Wish Death) by 50 Cent.

What classic song should be stripped of its title?

Layla by Derek and the Dominos.

What is the best song to have sex to?

The Memory by Roy Ayers if you’re making babies. Electric Head, Part 2 (The Ecstasy) by White Zombie if you’re making memories.