Amy Taylor knows her worth

Amyl and the Sniffers continue to fuck with control on their new single

To observe that Amy Taylor is a force of nature is already a cliché—cheers to her for securing her legend so early in her career. Amyl and the Sniffers have been releasing music for eight years, and during that brief span Taylor’s maelstrom of aggression, anger, humor, and no-fucks-given has only gained power. The band has a new single out, “U Should Not Be Doing That,” and listening to it brought me back to another track, “Gacked On Anger” from the band’s 2019 self-titled, full-length debut.

I’m thinking about being pissed-off, about its energy and currency. In her essay “My Soldier,” Juliana Gray writes about being sexually assaulted as a thirteen year-old; a louche older boy (“He smelled like cheap snack bar pizza and cigarettes”) kissed her at a local pizza joint without her consent. “That night, at home, I felt utterly humiliated,” Gray wrote. “I was certain the entire encounter had been a prank, a dare, a cheap laugh for a couple of army guys at my expense.”

I pictured them chuckling, cracking jokes, imitating my awkwardness. I was even more horrified that my first real kiss—unreciprocated as it was—had come from a total son of a bitch. For days I sulked. I fumed. I imagined snappy comebacks, curt refusals, swift kicks to the groin. I plotted revenge.

In classic teenage melodrama, Gray resolved to “kill” this loser via feverish bedroom incantations and magic spells. A “bookish kid, introspective, a fan of Stephen King and, by extension, the occult,” thirteen year-old Gray had read “a little bit about magic, mostly rubbish about dreams (place a bay leaf under your pillow the night before Valentine’s Day to dream of the man you’ll marry) and love spells (burn a red candle while concentrating on a picture of the boy you wish to enchant). There were also spells to bring about mishap, illness, and death.” The problem?

I had no spell book, no herbs, no enchanted candles—all of the spells seemed to call for candles—nothing remotely smacking of magic. But I was angry, and that felt like power.

That last sentence has stayed with me for a long time.

---

“Gacked on Anger” appears early on Amyl and the Sniffers (and was released as a single), and it sets the album’s tone, swallowing its rage to reach some measure of control, but threatening to explode all the while. The Sniffers—guitarist Declan Martens, bassist Gus Romer, and drummer Bryce Wilson—are an ace punk/pub rock band, alternately hyping and goading Taylor, good-naturedly, like the mates they are, as she sings, shrieks, and yelps about personal and, increasingly, political messiness. On the rollicking, thrilling “Control,” from Amyl and the Sniffers, the band tensely idles for thirty seconds as Taylor channels Iggy Pop and loudly wills her mantras—I need control, I’m in control—until they tear through the roof of the song. The band’s disciplined maneuvering of Ship Taylor as she enters choppy waters is terrifically exciting.

---

Related posts:

---

Her and the band’s fury in “Gacked on Anger” stems from money issues—there’s never enough. The song starts with what at first sounds like a fuck-up, the band stumbling, until a half bar in you realize that it was the sonic equivalent of a sharp intake of breath, held for calm in the face of bitterness—the band resolves for the remainder of the song to just try and keep it together, the mid-paced chug a revolt against losing your shit.

The singer works her butt off “every single day / For the minimum wage and I don’t get paid.” So she can’t pay rent; she’s “sleeping on the floor, in a car, in a tent.” She wants to “help out the people on the street,”

But how can I help them when I can’t afford to eat?
How do I survive? How do I get by?
I can’t go to sleep ‘cause there’s trouble in my mind

Taylor hollers in the chorus that she’s “stressed on tick” because she’s “gacked on anger,” Australian patois that, with its graphic, spittle-spawned sound and the band’s angry, three-chord emphases behind it, translates just fine to these American ears. (Who needs a slang dictionary?) Taylor did helpfully explain to Bill Pearis at BrooklynVegan that the song “is roughly about being so angry that it feels like your gacked—‘gacked’ means like fucked on drugs, high. The lyrics ‘stressed on tick because I’m gacked on anger’—tick is a roundabout way of saying debt/loan.” She added,

The song lyrics are about money and class and my experiences with that, and the weird way my mind tries to wrap around the idea of having money/not having money/being in debt/getting paid or not paid as a musician. It’s also about the rat race/pleasure/shame/stress of money and the power that it has on day to day life, and the power of class to keep us too busy and too dumb to help other people, or make any kind of change in the “system”. We keep on working really hard for peanuts. I’ve been lucky in comparison and I’m grateful but in reality shit’s pretty fucked sometimes, and there’s lots to be angry about.”

Amen.

---

If “Gacked on Anger”’s about railing against economic forces over which you have little control, the resulting meth-like high an unwanted gift, the new single, out this week, fights a different kind of oppression. A pit bull wearing short-shorts and a grin, Taylor’s never been shy about getting up in the face of sexism and patriarchy—dig the hilariously righteous “Stole My Pushbike,” for a funny yet fierce example, and the remarkable “Knifey” for a dead-serious one. In “U Should Not Be Doing That,” Taylor takes on nameless, faceless figures who insist on defining Taylor on their terms, explicitly telling her what she can and cannot be doing. Good luck with that.

“U Should Not Be Doing That” is, like “Gacked on Anger,” a mid-paced groove, but this time one aimed at the dance floor. Led by Romer’s syncopated bass line, joined by Martens’s strutting guitar riff, the band rides a quasi-funky grind on top of which Taylor complains about the eyes watching and judging her as she hops the globe with her band, doing her thing in front of growing, knocked-out crowds. But there’s exasperation behind her grin, as there’s always “Another person saying I’m not doing it right / Another person tryna give me some kinda internal fight.”

But I’m working own my worth, I’m working on my work, I’m working on who I am
I’m working on what is wrong, what is right, and where I am
I know my worth, I’m not the worst
You told me once I was

Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, London, or down under in Sydney, Melbourne, Naarm, Tassie, Gadigal, Brizzie—everywhere’s the same, in that in each city or town the singer’s held aloft in elated mosh pits as she’s also being held to absurd bigoted and dogmatic gender standards, the phrases “fuck that bitch,” “flash those tits,” and the condemnatory title command of “You should not be doing that” ringing in her ears and befouling social media. Yet the singer, with her band plugged in and ready to rumble, is “doing the work,” “putting on thesе shoes and these socks cuz I gotta gеt out of here.”

In its relative lack of harmonic changes and its lyric-forward approach, the song feels as if it were written and recorded swiftly, in the immediate buzz of inspiration, Taylor’s aggressive vocals leading the charge. “Lyrically it’s pretty self-explanatory,” Taylor remarked to Laura Rosierse at When the Horn Blows. ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’ makes me laugh, but it’s also in a way poking fun at the shock that people still feel at a little bit of skimpy clothing, and the bitchy high school way that the music community still is (yes I’m talking to you random 40 year old metalheads sitting around a table doing lines and bitching about a 28 year old chick in a band for wearing shorts and ‘selling out’) but it mainly makes me laugh. It’s unconscious and meant nothing at the time of writing it but now I think it’s a comedic way of rubbing the dog’s nose in its own dog piss after it peed on your favourite rug or something.”

The band seems to have urination on the mind right now. The image accompanying the song’s digital release captures Taylor, squatting in a dirt lot, relieving herself as she beams, her indifferent band members standing behind her. It’s an apt if shopworn act of defiance-theater; they’re all having so much fun with it that it feels fresh all over again.

In the lively video, Taylor and actor Steven Ogg vamp it up, working themselves into a lather performing Gutsy Singer versus Judging (Male) Fan, in a liquor store parking lot, an abandoned pool, a graffitied city tunnel, alongside a busy airport. They end the song by darting in to a small, dark bar where the band’s playing, their native joint, where judgements and should’s need to be left at the door.

---

I caught Amyl and the Sniffers at The Vic in Chicago in 2022, one of the first shows I attended after the COVID lockdown, and, man, they did not disappoint.

In a way, I’d been prepped: in October of ‘21 the band played their album Comfort To Me in its entirety live, “on a slab of concrete in a suburban wasteland somewhere in Melbourne,” as they’d hyped before the gig; it turned out to be on a pier at the Williamsport Docks. The streamed event was sublime, a bit surreal, and sorely needed at the time, huddled as we were in our homes worldwide as rock and roll clubs and venues remained shuttered. Amy Taylor sang and roared at the sky, shimmied, jogged, ran sprints, danced alone, threatened to tumble into the waters of Port Phillip, waved at passing boats. The band cooked behind her. Rock and roll as the sun sets.

Top photo: “Amy Taylor—Amyl and the Sniffers” via Wikipedia Commons

“Amyl and the Sniffers at Rough Trade” via Wikipedia Commons