Amyl and the Sniffers – Cartoon Darkness

★★★★☆

Released October 25th, 2024 on Rough Trade Records

Potentially the most Melbourne band on Earth, Amyl and the Sniffers have proven over the course of the Plague Era that they are, with only very tenuous alternatives, the punkest fucking thing going today. The band’s third album, Cartoon Darkness, continues to make the case for this.

What is it? The band plays like a headalong hurricane, of course. There has been a certain bifurcation in punk rock over the last twenty years. Maybe you doubled down on weird shit like technical skill and professionalism. You were lucky enough to be labeled math or fell into mere metalcore. Else, you probably adopted a strident faux-Springsteen voice and became Rise Against or Against Me or, worse, The Gaslight Anthem. Australians had to come around to remind us that, no, punk rock is supposed to be a bunch of no-future early twentysomethings on large amounts of varying drugs slapping together glue-sniffer songs with no-name instruments that they then record through a wall. To echo Pat the Bunny: if we’re picking sides, I guess that I am for every shitty three-chord high school punk band.

There’s also Amy Taylor, Amyl herself, whose voice continues to scour all the calcified, fossilized parts of your soul away, leaving you ready to accept raw power into your heart (and also preparing you to huff some premium gasoline). She spends a lot of time here railing against the haters. Punk, especially hardcore, but a lot of punk, functions mainly as a paranoid boy’s club. Cartoon Darkness works as an album-length middle fingers to guys that objectify her, guys that dismiss her just for being a woman in an aggressive music scene, guys that feel they have the right to tell her what she should and shouldn’t be doing. This is an album that begins with the line “You’re a dumb cunt” – it is not subtle in its rage. It’s projected toward herself as well, of course – ACAB means killing the cop in your head.

It ends on pure triumph, though. The closing track, “Me and the Girls”, is a future anthem in the making. I will be shocked beyond belief if it doesn’t eventually get stitched into a hundred thousand TikToks. It makes for a rather abrupt end to the album, but what a high to end on. The band have the crown, for as long as they can keep it. Or as long as they want it. Or until they explode.