Photo Gallery: Amyl and the Sniffers in Chicago

Brassneck | May 11, 2025

Amyl and the Sniffers

The Salt Shed

Chicago, IL

May 8, 2025

Recap and photos by Curt Baran

“If someone gets knocked down, you pick them back up! We look out for each other!”
Amy Taylor usually exclaims these words before every Amyl & The Sniffers show. It has come to represent a sort of declaration that the quartet from Melbourne, Australia are in a codependent relationship with their audience. It’s a healthy, repedetive cycle in which the band feeds their devotees what they crave, and the band, in turn, gets fueled from that expended energy being pushed back toward the stage.

It was almost immediately apparent that this was precisely how the evening would unfold during the opening song “Control.” The band is currently hitting the boards in support of their latest album, 2024’s Cartoon Darkness, and, when tickets went on sale for this past Thursday’s performance at The Salt Shed, they were snapped up in an eye’s blink.

The band’s currency is a kind of third-wave punk rock, cross pollinated with pub culture and proletariat politics. The aural aesthetic that they produce is the perfect vehicle for Amy Taylor to unleash her frenetic antics. Throughout their almost two dozen song set, Taylor landed somewhere between a whirling dervish and the tornado that the cartoon Tasmanian Devil would produce. As her band mates pounded their way through hard rockers like “Security,” “Tiny Bikini,” “Freaks To The Front” and the pro-woman anthem “Me And The Girls,” it was near impossible to remove your gaze off of the bleached blonde lead singer who struck all the iconic rock poses and managed completely sincerity when doing so.
Which each successive release, the mighty, little band from The Land Down Under continues to grow its audience one gig at a time. How unleashed they will be the end of this tour is anyone’s guess.