Amyl & The Sniffers - Cartoon Darkness World Tour sells out two shows at Auckland's Power Station Photo: John Angus Stewart- PHCFILMS
After exploding onto the world stage with the 2024 album Cartoon Darkness, Melbourne punk band Amyl and The Sniffers are watching their own big dreams come true.
For guitarist Declan Mehrtens - who was born to Kiwi parents in Perth - one of these was finally seeing some family in the audience.
"Everywhere in Australia the band gets all their family coming down, so it's exciting for me that I finally get to play for [my family]," he told Music 101's Maggie Tweedie in an exclusive interview.
Listen to Tony Stamp's review of Cartoon Darkness here.
Fronted by the charming and often scantily clad Amy 'Amyl' Taylor, Amyl and The Sniffers formed in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda back in 2016.
Two years later the band went overseas for the first time - touring the US with fellow Australian band King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard where they scored an American record deal and began earning enough to live on.
For a group who'd always been taking things "gig by gig", these events didn't feel like a turning point at the time, Mehrtens said, but it now seemed 2018 was their point of no return.
The next year their self-titled debut album was released, followed by Comfort to Me in 2021 and Cartoon Darkness last year.
Writing songs for it in Melbourne last January and February, Mehrtens said he had a "really productive summer".
"For whatever reason I just went crazy writing. I was doing stuff one-on-one with Amy and then doing stuff with just the boys instrumentally that Amy would work on afterwards. And then we took it to LA and made it into Cartoon Darkness."
Amyl & The Sniffers guitarist Declan Mehrtens is excited to finally have some family in the audience at the band’s New Zealand shows this month. Photo: Danysha Harriott
Amyl and The Sniffers recorded their third album - on "mates rates" - at The Foo Fighters' famous Studio 606.
"They just let us use everything in the studio. We used their engineers. It was a cool process, just sort of imagining what we could do as Amyl and The Sniffers with the same resources that one of the biggest bands of the last three decades have got."
To produce Cartoon Darkness, they enlisted veteran producer Nick Launay, who despite being "a British bloke that grew up in Spain", had played a very important role in the history of Australian music, Mehrtens said, working with the likes of Midnight Oil, Silverchair, INXS and Nick Cave.
"It was important for us, being an Australian band, being so strong with our identity, that we had a producer who understood that and wouldn't sort of try and remove us from being Australian, I guess."
Australian band Amyl and The Sniffers third studio album Cartoon_Darkness Photo: Supplied
Although he was sure the rest of the Amyl and The Sniffers felt "very Australian", national identity was more complex for Mehrtens who said he was "born a Kiwi" - but in Western Australia.
"I've never really felt like an Australian… I've sort of always felt like an impostor… now that I live overseas I feel even less Australian again."
Although the band-mates talk most days, Mehrtens and Taylor were now based in Los Angeles while Sniffers Gus Romer and Bryce Wilson had remained in Melbourne.
"I never really am away from them long enough to miss them and we're never together long enough to work on any music, but we spend a lot of time together which is cool."
Taylor's lyrics on the new track 'Big Dreams' - 'You got them big dreams, you wanna get out of here' - were really relatable to creative people living in places like Australia or New Zealand, Mehrtens said.
While living in LA was the realisation of one big dream he never imagined would come true, playing for lots of his Kiwi family members for the first time was another.
"It feels really good. I'm home."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
