There is a moment at the end of Amyl and the Sniffers’ music video for Guided by Angels that sees frontwoman Amy Taylor quiet and alone, for once. After ripping down freeways and tunnels in the back of a Mitsubishi Lancer, her tiny body hanging halfway out of the back window, diving into the sea and dancing between the stationary Sniffers – drummer Bryce Wilson, guitarist Dec Martens and bassist Gus Romer – Taylor walks down a dark footpath, sits in the car’s front seat, laughs briefly and is suddenly still.
It’s over in a flash, but it visualises the tension that Taylor is working through on the Melbourne punk band’s second record, Comfort to Me, which sees her wanting to let affection past her calloused exterior and to show herself as a whole, flawed person, particularly in the face of a public image that means she is often perceived as a caricature.
Her onstage energy is central to the Sniffers’ success. Since releasing their first EP in 2016, they’ve built a reputation for raucous live shows that go off like a popped cork. They signed to Rough Trade and ATO Records after a celebrated appearance at Brighton festival the Great Escape in 2018, and their self-titled debut, released in 2019, earned them a nomination for the Australian music prize and the Aria award for best rock album.
We talk over Zoom as Taylor prepares chilli con carne for dinner. “The boys” call in from different rooms in the same place: “the Amyl mansion, Beverly Hills,” Romer deadpans.
We discuss our respective dinner plans, but since we’re speaking on the 200th night that Melbourne has lived under Covid lockdowns, there’s little joy to be found in cooking any more. Wilson offers his leftover Domino’s to Taylor. I ask if any of them are the type of housemate to label the food in the fridge. “Are you? You are, aren’t ya!” Taylor asks me.
She describes herself as “turbo”, and over the hour we talk, her bandmates only occasionally get a word in: even when she’s not quite sure of her point, she finds clarity quickly and frequently winds up somewhere profound. Lockdown changed the way she sees the world, making her more cynical and forcing her into a state of introspection, she says.
“It hits you like a waterfall: how do I retrain my brain to not be intense and think differently and feel OK about feeling sad? I wanna punch stuff and do cartwheels and f*cking yell, but that’s not good all the time.”
After years of living in different shared houses between local and international tours, the band found themselves back under one roof in 2020, just before the start of the pandemic. When Melbourne enjoyed rare days out of strict lockdown, they spent their days working on Comfort to Me in a tinny storage locker as furniture removers came and went from the neighbouring units. Lockdown-induced delays granted the usually spontaneous outfit the rare luxury of time – although lacking the opportunity to road-test music designed for sticky-carpeted venues and increasingly large festival crowds proved an interesting creative challenge.
While Comfort to Me elevates the Sniffers’ trademark crunchy guitars and unrelenting drums, it’s also a tender record, showing a new sentimental side to Taylor’s lyricism. She pored over the lyrics for the first time, determined to do justice to the way her love life made her feel.A trio of songs document a crush becoming real-life romance. Hertz began as “a fantasy song”, as she imagined being swept off her feet and transported out of the city. Then, when it became real, came doubt: “No More Tears was wrapped around my really bad mental health and feeling super scat in the brain and trying to start a relationship, but also feeling not really valuable or lovable just cos I was so emotionally unstable,” she explains. Maggot, meanwhile, is “just straight up a love song”. What better way to capture love, she decided, than with the image of an animal carcass that “gets filled up with maggots and it starts wiggling … it’s a whole new life. It gets possessed.”
Which one is she: the maggots or the carcass?
“I don’t know. Both! That’s love.”
Taylor has been stoking her own potential. On Don’t Fence Me In, she rails against what Australia’s pervasive, tall, poppy syndrome tells her she should – or cannot – be. Drawn from a feeling of frustration so extreme it left her “hating the literal walls and not trusting anybody”, the song is a declaration of her ambitions (“Don’t fence me in … I’m born to be big”) and a response to the idea that a band who came out of an insular pub scene should stay there for ever. “We’ve had heaps of support, but at the same time, we’ve had a lot of people really f*ckin’ neg out on us,” she says. “You can sit at [Melbourne’s famous punk venue] the Tote and drink until you’re 80, but I don’t want to do that. I have the opportunity and I’m going to take it.”
She is also developing her political consciousness, turning to books by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell to help her process the pandemic. “I never saw value in reading, and then I realised that I could be an intellectual weapon if I read.” Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens influenced the song Capital, in which Taylor confronts the failings of the Australian government in the face of mounting crises such as the devastating bushfires, farmers affected by prolonged drought and the treatment of Indigenous Australians.
“Where I come in from, I don’t know much about this sh*t,” she says. “Nobody gets taught Indigenous history in school. You have to search for it if you want to learn about it. A big chunk of me is a straight-up, motherf*cking bogan and I’m proud of that part, but I want to listen to other people. There’s probably heaps of people who feel the same way we do, but they get lumped in [as ignorant] because they like cars and ciggies.”
Like a pitbull on a chain that rolls over to let you rub its belly, Taylor seems at peace with the whiplash she inspires in people: if anyone is still confused that a girl who “wants to smash sh*t” can also be a vulnerable, deeply feeling person, “it’s because they’re not thinking properly,” she says. “Don’t box me into your simple idea of me. It’s not as simple as it looks.”
Comfort to Me is out on Friday 10 September
