New Video: Amyl and The Sniffers Share Defiant and Punchy “Jerkin'”

Acclaimed Aussie punks Amyl and The Sniffers will be releasing their third album, the Nick Launay-produced Cartoon Darkness on Friday through B2B Records/Virgin Records. The album, which will feature BBC Radio 1 Hottest Record “Chewing Gum,” U Should Not Be Doing That,” BrooklynVegan‘s, Consquence‘s, Paper‘s, Paste Magazine‘s and Under the Radar‘s Song of the Week and a ton of other bangers that will showcase the band’s quantum progression and their boundless energy.

The band’s Amy Taylor explains, “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. 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. 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.”

The album’s third and latest single “Jerkin'” is a straightforward, defiant and punchy ripper that further cements the acclaimed Aussies unique ability to convey righteous fury with a tongue-in-cheek bit of humor, all while being rousingly cathartic.

“It’s good to express your anger when someone’s been pissing you off and it’s good to have humor in life, especially as a woman, when you’re meant to just passively say ‘everything’s good’ to keep everyone else comfortable,” Amy Taylor says of the new single. “The best part about this song is that a squirter can be anybody’s genitals. I wanted to write a song to big-up ‘the self’ while putting down the ‘other’ because sometimes, even if it’s just for a small window, that’s the best way to laugh something off and empower yourself. World’s pissing me off and breaking my heart more than ever right now, might as well poke it back. It’s pointless but it’s cathartic.”

Directed by long-time collaborator, PHC Films‘ John Angus Stewart, the accompanying video for “Jerkin'” features an eclectic array of models, who strip naked, not to for titilation, but to show the remarkable diversity of the human body. Throughout each model shows a sense of pride and playfulness. Of course, because we live in a weird society, a censored version appears on streaming platforms — and just above the text of this post. A full, uncensored version is only available to watch on the band’s website: https://www.amylandthesniffers.com. You must be 18 and older to view the uncensored version.

 “The level of offense that a vagina or penis can generate is absolutely bizarre. Once, Amy said to me, ‘If the world wasn’t so fucked up, I’d never wear clothes,'” John Angus Stewart says. “It’s the context we stamp onto our sex organs that makes them innately ‘offensive.’ This is why we wanted to strip away the artifice and examine the body in an open, conversational way. We approached the project as if it were a performance in itself. From concept to crewing to casting, we (the production) let the project evolve in the most natural way possible, allowing our subjects to dictate their level of input based on their comfort on the day. We were learning what it was as we were making it, which is basically the opposite approach I’m used to. But because this idea was driven by people’s personalities, it felt wrong to do it any other way. We just kept pulling things further and further back until we were left with just a white wall and the human body. I want to come out of everything I do with a different perspective. Just as one’s perspective changes with an Amyl song, I want to change in the same way. I think we all walked away from the shoot with an innate need to be less prudish and give less of a shit.”