It’s entirely justified to find Amyl and the Sniffers annoying just on the basis that the Melbourne punk quartet romanticizes the dirtbag 1970s to a degree that’s cartoonish. Too young to have experienced Dookie firsthand, let alone Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Amyl and the Sniffers are blessed by the callous disregard of youth, adopting ratty mullets and tacky high-waisted jeans as gleefully as they swipe riffs from the Damned and the Stooges. The blatant rips are the point: Irked by dead-end jobs and digital chaos, they’re seeking refuge in the past.
What keeps Amyl and the Sniffers from being a boring retread of old rock’n’roll tropes is that apart from their intentionally ugly images—whether it’s their stage getups or the cover art to their eponymous first album, they celebrate the aspects of the ’70s best left forgotten—the band really doesn’t care about the specifics of history whatsoever. No matter how often their fuzzed-out riffs and frenetic rhythms hint at familiar sounds, Amyl and the Sniffers rarely evoke any one specific band on their debut: It’s all a gaudy pastiche, cobbled together from barre chords, spittle, and lager.
On their earliest EPs, Amyl and the Sniffers played with this same aesthetic but they were constrained by their homespun origins. The group wrote and recorded the entirety of 2016’s Giddy Up within 12 hours, and its 2017 sequel, Big Attractions, seemed only slightly more considered. Both EPs were textbook exercises in DIY where it was impossible to separate the content from the format; as the songs blazed by in minute-long bursts, the sound thrilled as much as the hooks.
By the very virtue of being released on a major label, Amyl and the Sniffers reverses that equation. While the group still tends to run lean—most of the album’s 11 songs clock in well under three minutes, with the whole thing rushing by in half an hour—all of the songs feel formed. Give some of the credit to producer Ross Orton. A veteran of the Sheffield scene—he played drums in Add N to (X) and floated through Pulp’s circles on his way to working on M.I.A.s’ Arular, gaining a noteworthy credit by producing Arctic Monkeys’ 2013 LP AM—Orton gives the band a beefier, bolder sound. This increased heft accentuates how Amyl and the Sniffers can sound like heirs to the sharpie rockers of Australia, a dirty underground movement of the ’70s that traded upon glam and nascent heavy metal—a sound that eventually wormed its way into the gnarly riffs of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo. To an extent, these callbacks are deliberate—certainly, Amyl and the Sniffers borrow heavily from the sartorial style of the sharpies—but what makes the group such a blast is that it takes no knowledge of arcane Australian rock’n’roll to enjoy their debut. The group exists entirely on the surface, cranking amps to 11 and playing like it’s in a rush to head back to the bar.
What makes Amyl and the Sniffers slightly preferable to one of the band’s gigs is that Orton channels its energy and then adds definition to its roar. Also, at home it’s easier to catch lead singer Amy Taylor’s knack for the catchphrases and fleeting images that anchor their songs. Perhaps Taylor doesn’t often shape these words into a coherent story—“Gacked on Anger,” a perennial anthem of the underclass (“I wanna help out the people on the street/But how can I help them when I can’t afford to eat”), and the besotted “Got You” come the closest—but it’s enough to suggest she could sharpen this instinct once she bothered to take a breather.
Then again, the appeal of Amyl and the Sniffers is that it never bothers to slow down. That doesn’t mean the record lacks slack moments—the opening instrumental fanfare “Starfire 500” feels best left on the stage, where the lads can vamp as audience anticipation for Taylor grows—but the aggressive acceleration means the album never invites any time for contemplation. Such relentless momentum can give the illusion that the songs are sturdier than they are, but that’s also the pleasure of Amyl and the Sniffers: The album exists so thoroughly in the moment that it winds up obliterating the group’s fetishization of the past and just delivers pure, uncut rock’n’roll fun.
