Amyl And The Sniffers Detail New Album 'Cartoon Darkness,' Drop Single 'Chewing Gum'

Amyl And The Sniffers are well and truly back, announcing their first album in three years, Cartoon Darkness, and releasing a new single, Chewing Gum.

Kicking off the new album campaign, Chewing Gum is an exciting rock tune that finds the band ripping through their typically infectious melodies with callbacks to ‘70s and ‘80s production – but cleaner, of course. Chewing Gum follows the release of the first single, U Should Not Be Doing That (with the video starring Grand Theft Auto’s Steven Ogg), which the band released in May.

Cartoon Darkness will be released via Virgin Music Group on Friday, 25 October. Produced by Nick Launay (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs), the band recorded their new album at Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 in Los Angeles in early 2024.

Fans can pre-order the album in several formats, including a limited-edition glow-in-the-dark vinyl with alternate album artwork. You can pre-order/pre-save the album here.

In a statement, singer Amy Taylor explained that the band’s forthcoming album is about the “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.”

She continued, “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.”

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For Taylor, the album finds her and her bandmates “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 halfway 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.”

On the new single, she added, “The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled. Doing the dishes, cleaning, but never eating the meal. 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. Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating.”

Check out the music video for Chewing Gum and the tracklist for Cartoon Darkness below.

This September, Taylor will speak at BIGSOUND as a conference speaker and will deliver an insightful keynote that will resonate with thousands of attendees.