Amyl & The Sniffers are as Australian as they come – and unapologetically so.
Blending a punk rock sensibility with lashings off rebellious rock, this Melbourne four piece epitomise everything there is to love about music.
No fancy gimmicks, no shits given, and not even a hint of ego, you get the feeling Amyl & The Sniffers would be just as happy performing to the posters on their jam room wall as they are playing to a capacity house.
Not that they have to play to themselves after taking the Australian music scene by storm with their self-titled 2019 debut album.
With an intense and ball tearing live show, Amyl & The Sniffers set about dismantling stages across the nation, extending their popularity overseas with BBC Radio 1 picking up and playing their music.
For some reason, bands tend to be judged more harshly on their second album, and with Amyl & The Sniffers set to release their follow-up Comfort To Me on September 10, guitarist Dec Martens, drummer Bryce Wilson and bassist Fergus Romer joined HEAVY to chat about the release and fill us in on what the band has been up to while the world around them went into chaos.
“I don’t think there was any planned direction,” Martens said of the album. “We were just sort of like trying to write as much as we could with the time we had off touring last year. So we ended up writing quite a few songs and recorded a few more and picked from them to go on the album. There wasn’t much of an idea, it was just let’s write as much as we can, and we recorded the best things that we wrote.”
Despite the fact the band recorded the album in between lockdown restrictions, Wilson stresses the whole process went as smoothly as it could given the circumstances.
“It was kind of nice because it gave us heaps of time,” he laughed. “There wasn’t any pressure to have a new set for a show or anything. It felt pretty cruisy for me. Having on and off writing sessions was pretty easy.”
In the full interview the guys talk more about the songs on Comfort To Me, the selection process for selecting the final tracks, how the album differs musically from their debut, the cover image and what it represents, letting their Australianism show through in their music and more.
