Amyl and the Sniffers: A watershed moment for the year’s most exciting (and foul-mouthed) band

Amyl and the Sniffers at the Roundhouse
Amyl and the Sniffers at the Roundhouse - Louise Phillips

Wednesday evening was a watershed moment for Amy Taylor’s chaotic punk band from Melbourne, who’ve been on a sharp upward trajectory post-pandemic, and two weeks ago hit the UK Top Ten with their skilfully streamlined third album, Cartoon Darkness.

At the first of three sold-out headline shows at the Roundhouse, Taylor was certainly dressed for the occasion, in her own liberated style, sporting the skimpiest of black leather hot pants, with matching bra top and calf-length boots, plus a mask and pleated Bolero jacket soon blithely tossed away.

It was hardly sensible attire for Blighty in mid-November, but the uncompromising 28-year-old soon warmed up by skipping heedlessly around the stage, and during the second song Freaks to the Front cavorting in the photo pit, spitting high-velocity lyrics of individuality and outsider freedom.

When I first saw Amyl and the Sniffers down the road at the tiny Lock Tavern on their first visit here in May 2018, they packed a ferocious punch, but you’d never have earmarked them for this week’s three-night stand with a combined audience of 10,000 fans.

Pre-Covid, the band largely attracted gawping old punks, presumably magnetised by the frontwoman’s lack of inhibition and her three mullet-haired male compadres’ pulse-racing noise. After six years’ hard touring and abundant media exposure, however, Taylor has come to represent a younger demographic, as she herself reasons it, partying hard beneath the shadow of relentless apocalyptic messaging about the climate crisis.

Amyl and the Sniffers at the Roundhouse
Amyl and the Sniffers at the Roundhouse - Louise Phillips

‘There’s no promise of a future,” she told one recent interviewer. “Even if you had enough money to buy a house, why would you even buy one? It’s hard not to be nihilistic.”

Throughout, the Roundhouse’s circular floor pulsated with full-blooded moshing to the Sniffers’ rapid-fire barrage. Taylor, like a ’90s ladette on steroids, her peroxide-blonde locks billowing, hurled lyrical bile about toxic males and online trolls. At this moment of commercial breakthrough, the new tracks from Cartoon Darkness, centred on slower, borderline-AC/DC riffs, brought a welcome variety to the 75-minute onslaught: Bailing on Me, about old friends deserting you, and Big Dreams, about ageing with unfulfilled ambitions, found Scary Amy actually singing, in a natural voice reminiscent of her sensitive fellow-countrywoman Courtney Barnett.

Elsewhere, she rapped about good old-fashioned Girl Power (Me and the Girls), mimicked an airhead model’s irritating whine (Tiny Bikini), and on Jerkin’, with its mammoth Sex Pistolsy chords, satirised social-media haters in 18-cert vernacular, before summarising, “they like on my outfits and hate my success”.

It was a show with a terrific, buzzy energy, from a band snapping into place just at the right time, with songs which hit the bullseye on pressing present-day issues. And here was a smart but unpretentious generational spokeswoman, blossoming before your very eyes.

Also tonight (November 14) and tomorrow; metropolismusic.com