Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers (Rough Trade/ATO/Virgin) Released 25th October 2024.
The 3rd album curse: a theory that proposes that every third album by an artist will be pants compared to the first two offerings. This cannot be further from the truth with Amyl & The Sniffers‘ Cartoon Darkness; clearly they are only just getting started. In less than 8 years they have left their sticky beginnings in Melbourne and headed out into the world to give it a big dose of spicy, aggro fun.
Unmistakably Australian, with lyrics like ‘you are fucking spiders, I am drinking riders’ from the opening track ‘Jerkin’. It’s a track that singer Amy Taylor states is establishing boundaries – a warning shot to those toxic voices that a kick in the crutch is imminent. Heavily laden with some of my favourite profanities, Jerkin’ is a perfect start to this visceral album, that will leave you wanting more. It’s in your face with ballistic energy, like those naughty soda ads that got banned in the 90’s.
Cartoon Darkness is the best way to spend half an hour. You absolutely will revisit Jerkin’, just because you can’t believe what you heard the first time. As a biker, I can confirm that ‘Motorbike song’ is 100% true; there is no better feeling from escaping this suffocating life, than hooning along on a big motorbike, tunes in your ears and shouting WOOHOO into the wind. In fact, I was blasting out this album as I was fixing my motorbike earlier – I’m itching to get out on it now!
Amyl and The Sniffers have their boot on the neck of the male dominated music industry, and aren’t letting off the pressure any time soon. Cartoon darkness is on sale now and absolutely deserves to be a worldwide no.1. Going on the streaming numbers, it won’t be long.
“Everything is meaningless!!! and everything is meaningful!! to me, dystopia is now and the future seems dark, but the future hasn’t happened yet, it’s just a sketch, and sketches are childlike, sketches are cartoon and cartoons are awesome. Sometimes it feels like we’re in the cross section of doom between climate crisis, AI, algorithms and psychopathic governments choosing war machines over empathy, and outdated ideas and all this never ending list of crap and the list goes on making everything confusing and heartbreaking. And everything is meaningless so everything it’s important and around it goes. I don’t want to mourn what hasn’t died yet, and the reason it’s so crap is because we don’t want to lose the things we do love. Sometimes I feel like I’m in that movie “Click” just fast forwarding through life because it’s all hard work but I don’t want to be like Adam Sandler at the end when he’s all shattered that he rushed through his life, I want to enjoy life now and sometimes people confused fun for funny because it’s been so long since they’ve laughed. And swear words are liberating and sometimes it’s all we got. Recorded at 606 Studios. Produced and Mixed by Nick Launay. Mastered by Bernie Grundman. Cover by John Angus Stewart. big ups to Simone Ubaldi, Andrew Parisi, Rough Trade, Virgin, Thomas Rennie for pulling the package all together, and an endless list of thank youse. I’ll shut up now and just let you see how you feel about it on your own but wanted to express all that.” Amyl & The Sniffers.
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