Entertainment
Amyl and the Sniffers move to L.A. and get a whiff of punk glory on 'Cartoon Darkness'
Amyl and the Sniffers have always appreciated any small bit of good news. Even when the Australian punk rock quartet recorded its charmingly raw debut EP, “Giddy Up,” in a single night and released it online in 2016, the initial 100 streams were reward enough.
“To us, that was massive,” says singer Amy Taylor, aka “Amyl,” with a grin. “We get one play on local community radio and we’re like, ‘We’re massive. We’ve made it.’ You get a support slot in a 200-capacity room, we’re like, ‘We’ve made it.’ It’s really hard to get a perspective bigger than what we can see. … We’re very much appreciative of what’s happening rather than thinking about what might happen so much.”
Amyl and the Sniffers feel the same way about their third album, “Cartoon Darkness,” released Oct. 25, a potent collection of snarly, ecstatic rock tunes and the occasional ballad. Its first single, “U Should Not Be Doing That,” quickly earned millions of Spotify listens and heavy rotation for its music video (1.6 million views on YouTube alone), showing Taylor and a new companion stomping across Los Angeles as she sings lyrics of defiant self-worth.
“I am trying my best to get it on,” she sings, in her distinctively combative, percussive, very Australian voice. “Not everybody makes it out alive / When they are young.”
Fans are drawn to the Sniffers’ sound and attitude, which taps into the rowdy spirit of first-generation punk rock, along with a feisty, euphoric blond singer moving nonstop and usually dressed in a bikini top and shorts. The album comes two months after the band opened for a Foo Fighters concert at BMO Stadium in August, followed days later by two sold-out shows at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.
“Right now I think they’re the best rock band on the planet,” says Nick Launay, producer of “Cartoon Darkness,” in a phone interview. Launay has frequently worked with modern rock acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Idles and Nick Cave, but his career stretches back to the early U.K. punk and postpunk scenes.
“If they had been around in the ’70s, they would’ve been just as important back then,” he declares of the Sniffers. “They would’ve given everybody a run for their money.”
Launay says his mission in the studio was simply to fully capture the urgency of the band’s live shows. Aside from that, the new album’s 13 songs show a noticeable evolution to their punk rock sound, which remains connected to their early pub-crawling days without getting in the way of growth and the increasing power of their delivery.
“I think we’ve always been confident,” says Taylor. “It’s just that we’ve gotten better. Even when we weren’t very good, we were confident, but now the skills are slowly catching up to the confidence.”
Amyl and the Sniffers perform the second of two sold-out nights at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood, Calif. (Left to right) Guitarist Declan Mehrtens, singer Amy Taylor, and drummer Bryce Wilson.
(Steve Appleford/Steve Appleford)
The Aussie quartet is gathered on a recent afternoon around a Griffith Park picnic table, where a small herd of little kids makes a racket on the grass nearby. Taylor is dressed in a short black leather jacket, matching shorts and knee-high boots with stiletto heels. Pinned to her chest is a 2 Live Crew button.
Her three male bandmates are stylishly scruffy and tattooed rockers: guitarist Declan Mehrtens, drummer Bryce Wilson and bassist Gus Romer. Earlier this year, Taylor and Mehrtens moved to the U.S. and found places in L.A., while the others theoretically remain based in Melbourne. That kind of distance between bandmates might seem like a problem for a thriving rock act, but they’ve rarely been apart this last year, with only short breaks between recording the album, shooting music videos, a U.S. tour, then linking up again in Australia.
“We’ve been together this year pretty much every day, it feels like,” says Wilson.
Taylor adds, “We see each other all the time. It’s such an international project, we don’t live anywhere anyway.” She turns to Romer and Wilson and adds, “They might live in Australia, but it’s just where they store their crap.”
Los Angeles already feels very much like home to the singer and the guitarist. Mehrtens decided to move here after enjoying a Dodgers-Padres postseason game, and Taylor has befriended local rockers including Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arrow De Wilde of Starcrawler.
They are back on the road for a European tour that started Nov. 3 in Dublin and return for a North American tour in the spring.
Their work with producer Launay began by recording two songs last year at Sunset Sound, including “U Should Not Be Doing That,” released as a single in May. In the lyrics, Taylor pushes back against the naysayers that she says the band has faced at every step.
“At the end of the day, nothing’s really stopped me, and nothing probably will because I like doing it more than I care about what other people think,” Taylor says with casual defiance.
The new album opens with the driving noisy rock riffing of “Jerkin,’” as Taylor pushes back against haters with boasts and joyous profanity: “Last time I checked, I got success / Cuz the losers are online and they are obsessed / Typin’.”
There’s also the crazed racket of “Motorbike Song” and the alluring ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone by a wistful music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart. The clip has each of the band members on the back of motorcycles cruising across a wide-open desert landscape.
Guitarist Declan Mehrtens of Amyl and the Sniffers poses for a portrait a the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles.
(Steve Appleford)
Out front, Taylor sings from the back of a chopper, her vocals understated and almost resigned as she laments for those who feel stuck in place: “It isn’t easy when the town’s full of broken hearts / Can you be holding on any tighter? / Just take a breath and get out of this place / I know you can just get yourself together.”
There are hip-hop influences too, says Taylor. “Beastie Boys was big on this album,” she explains, “just ’cause they’re awesome and their phrasing is cool and we listen to a lot of them.”
Along the way, their producer has learned how to interpret what he calls “Amy Language.”
As one example, while Launay was mixing tracks for 2021’s “Comfort to Me,” Taylor was unhappy with the sound of “Hertz,” calling the song mix “too Lambo” — short for the luxury sports car Lamborghini. So she sent Launay a picture of a Subaru doing doughnuts on the asphalt as a better example to follow. “Like that,” she wrote him, “only driven by a hot Aussie chick … but she’s a politician.”
“Even though that sounds like crazy instructions, I knew exactly what she meant,” says Launay, who lived in Australia for a decade. “I mixed it rawer, wilder, sexier and put a couple of clever bits in there, sent it to her, and she goes, ‘Yep, that’s it. Next!’”
Taylor grew up there in Mullumbimby, a small hamlet in northern New South Wales, and a town she describes as “dirty hippie, no shoes, like antivax, organic food.” Rapper Iggy Azalea is also from there, and left for the U.S. at age 16. Azalea’s mother had a cleaning business that Taylor’s mom worked for briefly.
The band began in a house shared by Taylor, Mehrtens, Wilson and former member Calum Newton in beachside St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. Taylor worked at a supermarket and had purchased a used drumkit for about $50 that she kept in her bedroom.
Singer Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers poses for a portrait a the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles.
(Steve Appleford)
“We went to live music all the time — five, six nights a week,” says Taylor of their nightlife habits. “There’d be lots of house parties and bands would play in the backyard. I would freestyle rap a lot at the parties. It was my party trick. If it was a house show, I’d be like, can I get on the mic? Some bands were playing and I’d just like yelp words.”
That impulse evolved into forming a band. “We kind of wanted to sound like a B-52’s when we started,” says Taylor. “But we just couldn’t play good enough. So we sounded like this. But we liked the aggression of the music.”
As a new group, they were part of an Aussie garage-band scene with contemporaries like the Cosmic Psychos, Drunk Mums and Dumb Punts. At those first club performances, it was largely an older crowd turning out, no doubt connecting the Sniffers’ racket to their memories of early punk rock. “When we first started it’d probably be like 80% men over 50 — like looking out at a bloody dozen eggs,” she says of the gathering of gray and bald heads.
Their crowds have evolved a lot since then. During their two-night run at the Fonda, the dance floor was filled with young fans whom Taylor happily describes as “young frothers, just frothing about life, like rabid frothing,” she says with a laugh. “They’re excited and they’re young and they’re drinking for the first time and they’ve got mullets and they’re like, ‘Yeah!’ Our crowd’s usually very excitable people in the same way that I’m excitable.”
One more thing has changed: For most of the band’s career, Mehrtens spelled his last name as “Martens,” partly for simplicity’s sake but also because he wore Doc Martens boots. He adopted “Dec Martens” as a kind of punk rock alias, like the Germs’ Darby Crash or Pat Smear. He’s reverted to the correct spelling as a sign that the band has lasted well beyond its initial existence as a lark among friends.
“When I did that, I didn’t know that we were going to be getting three, four … albums in,” he says of his earlier nickname. “Now there’s visas involved, and I want people to know that it’s me who’s on the album.”
Being in the band also has changed Taylor’s perspective on many things. Now that she’s an accomplished lyricist, she pays more attention to the written word.
“I hated books. Now I love reading books and read all the time,” the singer says, then adds with a laugh, “Before, my God, I only had like 20 words in my vocabulary. Now I’ve got at least a hundred, so that helps. I love the riddles of phrasing and trying to get phrasing in a different kind of puzzle-y way.”
Romer jumps in, adding with a grin, “Sometimes she has a new big word and I’m very impressed.”
Movie Reviews
Bandar Movie Review: Bobby Deol roars in Anurag Kashyap’s unsettling legal thriller that refuses to spoon-feed
Name: Bandar
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Bobby Deol, Sanya Malhotra, Sapna Pabbi, Saba Azad, Jitendra Joshi, Raj B Shetty
Writer: Sudip Sharma, Abhishek Banerjee
Rating: 3.5/5
Plot:
Bandar follows Sameer Mehra’s character, essayed by Bobby Deol, a fading star who is desperately clinging to his past glory. Just as he attempts to rebuild his life and finds solace in a new relationship, his world comes crashing down. A former girlfriend files a heinous allegation against him, dragging him into a vicious, high-profile legal battle. Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, the film moves away from standard Bollywood courtroom setups. Instead, it dives straight into the murky waters of social media trials, public perception, and a sluggish judicial system where the truth gets buried under layers of gray.
What works:
Known for his chaotic energy, Anurag Kashyap takes a remarkably mature and controlled approach here. He avoids sensationalizing a highly sensitive topic, choosing instead to focus on the psychological claustrophobia of the protagonist. The prison sequences are exceptionally well-shot. They create a suffocating, raw atmosphere that makes you feel the weight of the character’s confinement. The script successfully avoids preachy, black-and-white monologues. It bravely forces the audience to confront their own biases regarding modern-day public trials and the digital judge-and-jury culture.
What doesn’t:
Clocking in at nearly two hours and twenty minutes, Bandar feels heavily weighed down in the second half. The narrative stretches thin, and a few subplots demand too much patience, making you wish for a tighter edit. The film stubbornly refuses to take a definitive moral stance or offer a neat resolution. While film enthusiasts might appreciate the complexity, mainstream viewers looking for a clear-cut ending or emotional payoff might walk away feeling detached and frustrated.
Performances:
- Bobby Deol is the beating heart of this film. Stripping away the massive macho swagger and menacing villainy of his recent hits, he delivers a deeply vulnerable, understated performance. He plays Samar with a mix of arrogance, confusion, and raw helplessness, proving his immense range.
- Sanya Malhotra anchors her screen time with her trademark reliability, turning in a grounded and impactful performance.
- Saba Azad and Sapna Pabbi excel in their respective roles, bringing genuine nuance to characters that could have easily been sidelined.
- Jitendra Joshi is an absolute scene-stealer, commanding your attention every single time he steps into the frame.
- Indrajith Sukumaran and Raj B Shetty are absolute show stealers with their raw acting.
Final Verdict:
Bandar is an unsettling, morally complex thriller that refuses to spoon-feed its audience. It isn’t a comfortable watch, nor does it try to be. While the sluggish pacing in the second half prevents it from being an absolute masterpiece, it is worth a watch for Bobby Deol’s spectacular acting reinvention and Anurag Kashyap’s gritty, thought-provoking storytelling.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Pinkvilla. No statement in this article is intended to defame, harm, or malign any individual or entity.
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Kathy Hilton will no longer be the grand marshal of West Hollywood’s pride parade.
The city and WeHo Pride on Wednesday released a joint statement, announcing that “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star would no longer serve as the Grand Marshal Icon for the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade. The event is scheduled for Sunday.
“After thoughtful discussions, the City of West Hollywood, the WeHo Pride production team, and Kathy Hilton have determined that the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade will not designate a Grand Marshal Icon honoree,” read the statement.
The decision comes less than a week after Hilton was announced. That May 28 announcement was met with swift backlash from the LGBTQ+ community and allies, who called out Hilton’s ties to President Trump and alleged MAGA-leaning politics. Critics also cited accusations that the socialite had used a homophobic slur while on a trip with other cast members of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” an action she has previously denied.
In their joint statement, West Hollywood and the WeHo Pride team expressed their appreciation for “the respectful and sincere dialogue” around both the event and the “role and significance” of Pride honorees.
“The City of West Hollywood has always believed that Pride belongs to the community,” the joint statement said. “Since its earliest days, Pride has served as both a celebration and a platform for activism, visibility, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit of equality, dignity, and justice for LGBTQ+ people. … These conversations reflect the passion people have for WeHo Pride and underscore the importance of ensuring that WeHo Pride continues to honor the history, values, and diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ community.”
In a statement, Hilton expressed gratitude for being considered for grand marshal and reaffirmed her commitment to the LGBTQ+ community and causes.
“My reason for wanting to be involved in this year’s WeHo Pride weekend was simple: to celebrate, support, and share in the joy of a community that means a great deal to so many people,” Hilton said. “Pride is, and always will be, about celebrating and uplifting LGBTQ+ voices, experiences, and achievements. … My support for the community and WeHo Pride is unwavering.”
She also mentioned several queer advocacy organizations and events she has supported over the years, including GLAAD, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Dr. Mathilde Krim, God’s Love We Deliver and Project Angel Food.
The latest Pride-related dust-up follows the abrupt cancellation of the Long Beach Pride Festival in May. The city’s Pride Parade took place as planned.
Both snafus have occurred as conservative politicians and advocates continue to attack LGBTQ+ rights and visibility nationwide. Some Republican governors have even pushed for conservative alternatives to Pride month festivities. A recent Gallup poll has found that after years of steady gains, support for marriage equality and same-sex relationships has slipped, particularly among Republicans.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Travolta’s “Propeller: One-Way Night Coach” is One for the Ages — All Ages
Back in the good ol’days — the ’90s — John Travolta would love to get off the topic of “Michael,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Get Shorty” in interviews with film journalists like me and regale us with how utterly besotted he had been with his first flying experience, how that drove his passion for piloting and buying planes and airfield-adjacent luxury houses.
He didn’t even seem to mind having to move house when this or that development balked at him flying his Boeing 707 out of there on the way to locations.
Travolta would tell any journalist who asked that he was writing a kid-friendly book, “Propeller: One Way Night Coach,” based on his first flights as a child in old propeller driven airliners — cheap red-eye overnight treks with too many connections for your average jet age traveller to tolerate.
I remember picking up the book when it came out later in the ’90s — at an airport gift shop — and thinking “Well, that’s as cute as I figured.”
And now, decades later and trapped in the B-movie hell of his post “Gotti” career, Travolta’s turned that cute book into the most delightful, fanciful and colorful bon bon of a movie.
“One Way Night Coach” is a child’s fantasy of flight and flying the way it used to be — with pristine, uncrowded, futuristic airports, an early ’60s era of jets and prop planes with over-uniformed stewardesses in white gloves, the days “Back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham,” as Sideshow Bob memorably sneered on “The Simpsons’.”
It’s a fictionalized account of Travolta’s childhood about an only child (at least two Travolta siblings have bit parts in this movie) of a never-made-it/never-will actress/single-mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) who indulges her aviation-obsessed eight-year-old with a cheap cross-country overnight flight.
Little Jeff (Clark Shotwell) will revel in almost every Idlewild to Pittsburgh to Dayton to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver and Los Angeles minute. He strolls into the cockpit to meet pilots, charms the stewardesses and checks out the sleeping bunks on the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation, loving even the delays if not the Chicken Cordon Bleu he’s offered on legs of the journey that offer a meal.
And as he’s an observant child, he comments (Travolta narrates) on his 50ish mother’s vamping and posing, her choice of cigarettes (Newports) and drinks, the solo traveling men whose attention she pursues and earns.
“I was her best audience,” adult Jeff remembers of the mother who’d read him plays as bedtime stories and delusionally hopes that this trip to Los Angeles might be her “big break” even though she’s pushing 50.
“Hollywood called,” she’d explain about their overnight cheap flight arrangements to ticket agents and crew. “They told me to take the next flight!”
At every turn, Jeff meets or sees kindness — stewardesses who indulge his many questions and bump them up to first class on the mostly-empty planes, a captain who fixes his toy model of a Constellation, a mentally ill flyer who flips out but is calmed by a flight attendant who isn’t overworked and frazzled in jet-powered tin-can jammed with Joe and Jane Sweatsocks who think nothing of traveling in their pajamas.
Normally, I cringe at pictures this reliant on voice-over narration. I recoil from stars who populate their picture with Sandler etc. offspring. But “Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.
Sure, it’s fictionalized. But if you’ve followed Travolta’s life and career, a lot of him is in this — his raptoruous engagement with flying, an indulged child who developed a taste for fine food and creature comforts, a mother who was his guiding star as an actor.
I get why there are less adoring reviews than mine floating around “Propeller.” It’s unfailingly sweet. Mom’s man-hunting is seriously dated. This TWA tale is decorated with Gershwin’s majestic “Rhapsody in Blue” — United Airlines’ signature tune. And Travolta’s been around long enough for recent generations to come up and not feel a connection to the “Saturday Night Fever/Get Shorty” star whose career has fallen off and life has been visited by too much tragedy.
But I’d hate to be seated next to anybody who doesn’t appreciate this adorable, pristine and nearly perfect aviation fantasy on any flight, much less an overnight one.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ellen Travolta, Ella Beau Travolta, Olga Hoffmann and John Travolta.
Credits: Scripted and directed by John Travolta, based on his book. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:01
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