“We thought, ‘Why don’t we start a band? We’re housemates!’” shrugs guitarist Dec Martens, of ascendant young Australian thug-punks Amyl & the Sniffers, about the group’s spontaneous 2016 formation in their native Melbourne. He’s calling from the huge Roskilde Festival at 8pm on Thursday. They play at 2:30am, then shuttle off to a flight from Denmark to California, where they begin their U.S. tour at Burger Boogaloo in Oakland the next day.: “If a friend has a house party, we’ll play it, but it never turned out that way – we got booked for all these gigs and never played a house party!” he laughs.: The quartet (Martens, drummer Bryce Wilson, bassist Gus Romer, and singer Amy Taylor – the band’s titular “Amyl”) has seen their schedule get increasingly hectic. They formed one afternoon, wrote and recorded four songs in four hours – mixing and mastering that night – and delivered the finished masters the following morning. Their self-titled debut album just dropped: 11 sticks of intensified sonic dynamite, recorded by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, the Kills, Jarvis Cocker) and resembling a carload of 45s by Slade, AC/DC, and the Ramones that survived a bad wreck, the pieces haphazardly reassembled. Press and punters alike have fallen for the band’s granite-hard locomotion and Taylor’s messy charisma, showcased in their blitz of SXSW appearances this past March.: Tunes like “Gacked on Anger” also display her budding proletarian lyrical rage: “I wanna help out the people on the street/ But how can I help them when I can’t afford to eat?”: The LP was cut across three weeks in Sheffield, one song per day. This suits Martens: “It’s immediate, like the live show – that rawness. You don’t get to do a song three or four times onstage. I think that chemistry, that adrenaline you get from playing onstage – you try to capture that.”
Fri., July 12, 9pm