Melbourne punks’ smart, funny and emotionally nuanced return floors Pat Gilbert.

Sleazy riders: Amyl And The Sniffers are more emotionally nuanced on their third offering.

Amyl And The Sniffers

★★★★

Cartoon Darkness

ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

MOJO WAS straight out of the traps in early 2018 when, with their first two EPs packaged as the Big Attraction LP, Amyl And The Sniffers were set to visit these shores for the very first time. Our profile caught them full of youthful piss and vinegar, their fashion-defying rat’s-tail mullets as fresh and nasty as their old-school street punk sounds.

That was over six years ago, after which two more studio albums have revealed steady growth – the last, 2021’s Comfort To Me, providing a noticeably thicker, heavier, marginally more metal-y backdrop for Amy Taylor’s profane, bolshy, sex-charged diaries of life in the goon-sack sewer of Melbourne’s punk demimonde. Which begs the question: how do you continue to develop musically as a punk band and still be punk?

Cartoon Darkness achieves this by doing something rather clever: what the Sniffers do well it simply works tirelessly to do even better. Key to this is a judicious exercise in sonic reduction at the hands of veteran post-punk producer Nick Launay (recently of Nick Cave and Idles renown), who makes everything crisper, cleaner, edgier. It perhaps helps that the record was made at the Foo Fighters’ 606 studio, on the near-mythical console used for Rumours and Nevermind; yet while the latter was all about making Nirvana sweeter, here Mission Sniffer is to become brighter and more dynamic. And, critically, more emotionally nuanced.