Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers tore down the house at Paper Tiger Monday night for a high-octane, sold-out show.
But this wasn’t your average punk show. Before the Sniffers played their first note, lead singer Amy Taylor, decked out in a bikini top and hot pants made of Fox motorbike gloves, set the ground rules: “If anyone falls down, you pick them back up, and don’t touch anyone that doesn’t want to be touched!” Then the room exploded with “Control” off the quartet’s self-titled 2019 album, which flowed straight into “Security” from its 2021 LP Comfort To Me.
The band gets its unusual name from a party drug. “In Australia we call poppers amyl. So you sniff it, it lasts for 30 seconds and then you have a headache — and that’s what we’re like!” Taylor once told the BBC.
But Monday night’s high lasted for at least an hour. All the while, the packed crowd was a writhing mass that supplied a constant stream of crowd surfers, mostly women.
Amyl and the Sniffers has played a string of sold-out shows supporting the 2024 album Cartoon Darkness, its songs decrying the litany things fucking up in the world today.
“I feel bad for a lot people, especially in this country,” Taylor told the crowd. “I feel bad for the immigrants, I feel bad for the Black and Brown people, the trans people. And that cunt says he will do shit about the economy, but he doesn’t give a fuck about the working class.”
After alluding to Trump, Taylor added climate change and AI to the mix.
“And I don’t have the answers for any of this stuff, but I do just want to say that I’m acknowledging it because it’s so crazy sometimes to pretend that nothing is wrong,” she told the crowd.
This punk manifesto — part of what people love about Amyl and the Sniffers — was followed by the Cartoon Darkness track “Doing In Me Head.”
The set also included “Jerkin” and “U Should Not Be Doing That,” two other standouts from the new album.
Crowd pleasers from the rest of the Amyl and the Sniffers discography included “Me and the Girls,” “Hertz,” “Guided By Angels” and “Knifey.”
Monday night was the band’s first time playing San Antonio, and the crowd was in such a frenzy that it crushed up against the barrier in front of the stage, fans singing along to every song.
“Texas is fun as fuck!” Taylor said, acknowledging the crowd’s enthusiasm.
Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag opened the night with a blazing set of guitar-driven cock-rock showcasing Joan Jett-style vocals from frontwoman Tina Halladay.
After the tour de force of Amyl and the Sniffers, the crowd was far from depleted. Instead, it was buzzing as it made its way into the Paper Tiger courtyard. As if in a two-front war, Austin shock-punk and thrash metal band Tear Dungeon waited outside, and ripped into a mayhem-filled set of blood spewing and life-threatening anarchic antics.
Donning their signature gimp masks, the band incited a maelstrom of a moshpit in the courtyard, with frontman Andrew Cashen spewing fake blood from his mouth onto the crowd and climbing onto the venue’s roof. The set was short but intense, proving why Rolling Stone magazine referred to them as “Austin faves.”
At the tail-end of a 30-date tour, Cashen remarked that San Antonio was the band’s favorite stop. Maybe Taylor was right. Texas — and particularly San Antonio — is fun as fuck.
