THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Recorded with producer Nick Launay at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles — on the same mixing console that captured Nirvana’s Nevermind and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours — the latest Amyl And The Sniffers album is their most diverse yet.
It stretches from classic punk to the glammy strut of hit single U Should Not Be Doing That to the stormy balladry of Big Dreams to pugnacious punk of Jerkin’. The Sniffers are back and back with a vengeance — bigger, brighter, smarter and sharper in every way.
“Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god,” says singer Amy Taylor. “It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.
“Cartoon Darkness is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet — a childlike darkness,” she continues. “I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
Of course, it isn’t all a big game. “The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled,” says Taylor. “Doing the dishes cleaning, but never the one eating the meal, so close but it’s never enough, and trying to celebrate the ignorance of youth despite it being robbed away, so choosing ignorance, choosing to be dumb and choosing love, despite everything, choosing bad decisions for love, for life, because it is short, or is it long?
“Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating, and despite the external inferno, you walk away unscathed, through flames, burnt but only superficially, unstopped, unaffected, unhuman. Life is work, life is not free, we can never work enough because the end goal doesn’t exist, so all we can do is choose to be wrong.”
