Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Punk, Thrash Metal
Label: Rough Trade
Review in one word: Exhilarating
I don’t often review music, yet as I clean my house, go on walks, work, have friends around, hang out with my partner or read books…well I’m constantly listening to something! So here it goes – my favourite album of 2024 dropped only a few days ago, it’s Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers.
I have loved this band ever since I first heard them. This is their third album and I think it’s definitely their most impressive. Amyl and the Sniffers have created an energetic, emotionally intense and sonically complex album that exceeds the range of their previous (mostly garage punk) albums and encompasses thrash metal with satisfying meaty guitar solos, funky dance-punk earworms, romantic and melodic punk-ballads and funny satirical songs that give the middle finger to Amy’s bitchy critics.
Frontwoman Amy Taylor has enough raw energy to power a thousand suns. She is the female incarnation of how Iggy Pop was in the 70’s (both have a physically commanding, charismatic and eye-popping stage presence). I can’t wait to see them live!
The album was recorded with producer Nick Launay (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles in early 2024 and released only this week.
There’s loads of complexity to this album in terms of the depth and meaning of lyrics, musical styles, but overall the music fits together perfectly as a cohesive album.
In tracks, like ‘Bailing on Me’ Taylor seems to be channelling Courtney Love’s late 90’s album Celebrity Skin, with the melodic singing and gentle melancholy of the lyrics.
‘U Should Not be Doing That’ is an infectious and funky dance-punk track that has Amy talking back to her horrible critics and showing them for being the pathetic keyboard warriors they are.
‘It’s Mine’ is my favourite track of the album and is a real thrash metal banger…it’s about overconsumption and people feeling that they have right to have whatever they want in life. The perfect song to put on with a lot of bass if you want to truly immerse yourself.
‘Motorbike Song’ is a classic Aussie pub punk song and reminds me a bit of The Angels or the Saints.
‘Big Dreams’ has the melancholic and emotionally wrought vibe of an REM song. The lyrics are about living a life being stuck in a suffocating environment. This hits hard and in a deep way when combined with Amy on the back of a Harley in one long continuous take. Powerful stuff.
I have been so excited to see this band go from being a bunch of flatmates who formed a band in Melbourne to their launch into the outer reaches of the stratosphere in terms of international respect, adoration and recognition.
Something deep inside of me loves the chaotic intensity of fast and furious post-punk and punk. In particular, I have always been drawn to female-led, feminist and aggressively angry bands fronted by women like Sonic Youth, L7, Hole, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Gossip, the Dead Weather, Sleater-Kinney, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Snunk Anansie, Peaches and PJ Harvey. Amyl and the Sniffers are up there with these bands in my opinion – they are one of the greatest female-led rock bands ever.
To me, the women in these bands represent a strong form of womanhood as they refuse to comply to conventions of what a woman should be. They say ‘fuck all of that’ and it’s so liberating to see and hear a woman refusing to comply, to be good, quiet and passive. Instead these women exist outside of the status quo like sorceresses, weaving mesmeric magic and intriguing everyone.
So what exactly is Cartoon Darkness? Well it’s incredibly political and profound actually and captures the Zeitgeist of what’s going on in our world. Amy explains on the Rough Trade website:
“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. It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.”
“Cartoon Darkness is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet. A childlike darkness. I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
Amy Taylor
“The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled. Doing the dishes cleaning, but never the one eating the meal, so close but it’s never enough, and trying to celebrate the ignorance of youth despite it being robbed away, so choosing ignorance, choosing to be dumb and choosing love, despite everything, choosing bad decisions for love, for life, because it is short, or is it long? Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating, and despite the external inferno, you walk away unscathed, through flames, burnt but only superficially, unstopped, unaffected, unhuman. Life is work, life is not free, we can never work enough because the end goal doesn’t exist, so all we can do is choose to be wrong.”
Amy Taylor on Chewing Gum
There’s so much emotional nuance and depth to this album it will actually take me a long time and a lot of repeated listens to get to the bottom of it all. There’s equal measure of heavy themes and bright, funny and cheeky moments. I hope you will enjoy the danceable party anthems and that this album lightens your life as much as it has mine.
Content Catnip 