Album review: Amyl and the Sniffers unleash a Cartoon classic
Jeff Jenkins
STACK Writer
Amyl and the Sniffers become cartoon heroes – and heroines – on their rocking third album, ‘Cartoon Darkness’.
“Big ups to bogan chicks,” Amy Taylor declared when she delivered the keynote address at this year’s Bigsound music conference. “And big ups to anyone giving it a crack. You can endure, way more than you think you can.
“Life is a meaningless playground, and you should just enjoy it.”
Taylor’s band, Amyl and the Sniffers, turn up the fun factor on their third album, though they’re not afraid to address some serious subjects. “Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god,” Taylor explains.
But it’s not all bleak. “The future is cartoon,” Taylor concludes. “The prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
As she said at Bigsound, “turn the volume down on the bad stuff, turn the volume up on the good stuff”.
In good Nick
Amyl and the Sniffers made Cartoon Darkness at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles with Nick Launay, who was born in the UK, lives in LA, but has spent a lot of his life in Australia.
Launay has produced a stack of Aussie classics, including Midnight Oil’s 10-1, Models’ The Pleasure of Your Company, INXS’s The Swing, Silverchair’s Neon Ballroom, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Push the Sky Away, and The Living End’s Roll On.
Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers is out now via B2B/Virgin.
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