When Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers decided to record their debut EP Giddy Up in their sharehouse in Melbourne’s St Kilda one night in 2016, they didn’t overthink it. They weren’t even a band then, just housemates, and they threw their rough demos up on Bandcamp without giving it a second thought.
Since then, their super-charged, scrappy punk that catalogues the indignities of the everyday – getting your push bike nicked, munching on snacks, even sleeping in the gutter – has seen the band rise to support the Foo Fighters and sign a deal with Rough Trade. They’ve even become fashion muses, having walked the runway for Gucci and appeared in the brand’s latest ad campaign, where they feature alongside a bunch of other misfits, causing a ruckus amid ruins in Sicily.
From their collective mullets to their pummelling, hard rock hooks, Amyl and the Sniffers are the latest in a long line of modern Australian bands rebooting the brash, boozy, pub rock of the 1970s and 80s. Born in rowdy bars across Australia, pub rock bands have ranged from the anthemic AC/DC to the fuzzy garage punk of Cosmic Psychos, but what ties them together is the total embrace of their blue-collar backgrounds. But as much as those bands are a reclamation of aspects of Australian society that are seen as crass or tacky, their perspective is also arguably blinkered by their whiteness and insularity.
While pub rock has never really taken off outside of Australia, Amyl and the Sniffers have channeled the bravado of the genre into perfected, extreme punk theatrics that have gained them legions of fans in the UK, Europe and the States, where they have toured frequently. When I saw the band last, at Farmer & The Owl festival in Wollongong earlier this year, it was hard to keep up with tiny frontwoman Amy Taylor, who banged her peroxide-blonde mullet back and forth, humped the stage floor and routinely plunged herself into the crowd. Their fans were equally animated: pushing and pogoing and head-banging with relentless, sweaty energy.
It’s difficult to capture the chaotic sounds of a band whose live reputation precedes their recorded music. But on their eponymous debut album their ferocious sound remains intact. This is in part thanks to British producer Ross Orton, whose credits include the Arctic Monkeys’ 2013 album AM. Orton give the band’s sound more clarity and directness than before. It also allows Taylor’s fun, playful vocals to come to the fore. Her voice ranges from high-octane, piercing yelps to lacerating one-liners delivered with a thick, Australian twang. She woofs! There are times when you can almost hear her spit hit the mic, like when she bawls “Punisha! Punisha! Punisha!” on the track of the same name.
The album covers the same ground as their previous releases: being broke, getting violent, but there is also a frenzied chant about freak weather (Monsoon Rock), an anthem on self-assurance (Control), as well as a few love songs. The band are at their best when they are furious, something best distilled on Gacked on Anger, a track on which the band rail on working your “arse off” for a pittance, and the anxieties that result. “I can’t go to sleep / because there is trouble in my mind!” sings Taylor.
The band’s respect to the rock of the past is commendable, but it can sometimes border on pastiche, each riff striking as familiar. They are most interesting when they break from the confines of what they are emulating. There is something jarringly pleasurable about the single Got You, for instance, a sweet love song cloaked in meaty, hard rock riffs and a shouted chorus. Taylor doesn’t bother filling songs with fussy poetics or covert language. There are no euphemisms here, only a “classy bloke”, “beer in the cupboard” and drunken “eyes glazed over”. For a subgenre of rock that has rarely included women, hearing female longing and desire expressed with such a laconic, tough edge is both funny and thrilling.
To engage with Amyl and the Sniffers’ music is also to wrestle with where one draws the line between earnest emulation and careless imitation. Some claim that the band’s aesthetic fetishises the working class, to which Taylor responded in the Guardian last year: “‘No! It’s how we’re employed – we’re not fetishising anything.” It’s a strange expectation for a band like Amyl and the Sniffers to exude some supreme authenticity when pub rock’s original machismo is so ridiculous and cartoonish in the first place.
But there are moments on Amyl and the Sniffers when their anger and unrelenting energy feel misdirected and aimless, and their depictions of reckless, penniless living too thinly drawn. To draw attention to this seems besides the point, considering the band’s approach is to not overthink or care all that much. Still, I found myself wanting the songs to scrape a little deeper, to be filthier or funnier. There is so much room to poke and prod the pitfalls and narrowness of pub rock, to dismantle and reassemble it without reverence, and really, what would be more punk than that?
