Amyl and the Sniffers are the cover stars of the fourth issue of the BrooklynVegan digital magazine. Read the entire issue (at no cost) here.
With songs written on and off the road in 2023, Amyl & The Sniffers decamped to Los Angeles in early 2024 to record their third album with producer Nick Launay at Dave Grohl’s 606 West studio. Launay, who had mixed [previous album] Comfort to Me, is English but he’s worked with lots of Aussies, including INXS, Midnight Oil, The Church, and Silverchair (but also Yeah Yeah Yeahs, IDLES, and more). “Nick doesn’t play music himself,” Dec says of Launay’s production style. “He’d be like, ‘let’s do one more,’ trying to get the best performances out of us.” Amy agrees. “We’d be like, ‘that was great,’ and Nick would say, “No, I’m not going to let that go, I want it actually as good as it could sound. Even if he wasn’t able to say exactly what wasn’t right, he knew that he could push it and try it again.”
The studio has its own bona fides, as its Neve 8078 mixing board was the one used for Nirvana’s Nevermind, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, to name just three. Did they feel the energy of those artists and iconic albums flowing through the equipment while recording there? “Not really,” Gus chimes in, “but their signatures were all over the console. Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, everybody.” Amy adds, “But with so many great records made there, we didn’t want to be the ones to make a shit one, so in that way it inspired us.”
Declan says after two albums that were close to what the Sniffers were like live, he wanted to make more of a studio album that showed off new sides of the band. It would also be Amyl’s first as a bit of a free agent. After two albums on ATO, they signed a distribution deal with Virgin and started their own label. (The band remain on Rough Trade in the UK.) They say the process of making the album was largely the same, though. “There was no pressure to ‘step it up,'” Taylor says, with Mehrtens adding, “I don’t know if we do anything consciously. Our shows, our records, we just do everything unconsciously, instinctively.”
One of those new sides for Amyl on Cartoon Darkness is “Big Dreams,” a wide-screen, slow-burn epic that is part ballad and part spaghetti western, while encapsulating Taylor’s desires at the end of the pandemic to leave Australia and discover what else is out there. “You got them big dreams, you wanna get out of here,” she sings over Mehrtens’ arpeggiated, surfy guitar chords. “You’re sick of being stuck in the apartment / Ya strapped for cash and well, you don’t know where to start.” It’s almost as if current day Amy is talking to her 2020 self, urging her off the couch and out the door. “I know, it’s coming ’round again / Another birthday and another year older.” Amy says they were nervous about recording a song that wasn’t a pedal-to-the-metal ripper but “I just loved the music, and it almost wrote itself all in one go. The message is important to me. I have friends and know who are struggling financially, otherwise. People shouldn’t give up hope.”
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Catch Amyl and the Sniffers on tour in 2025 with Sheer Mag.