Amyl And The Sniffers give Summerfest much-needed kick in teeth

Amyl And The Sniffers do not ease into a space. They hit it with road rage energy, the kind that feels like a baseball bat to a windshield or a cement brick through a storefront window. It’s a full-body reminder that rock and roll should feel less like a catwalk and more like kicking a door off its hinges. When I was asked to review something at Summerfest this year, the Australian punk outfit was the first name I circled. This was the show on this year’s lineup that made me say, “Yeah, I’m fucking going.”

Everybody has their magic Cactus Club show. That show you saw that you couldn’t believe you saw in that humble yet historic space. For me, it was Amyl And The Sniffers back in 2019, when the mullet-adorned Australian band first came through Bay View. It was a precious pre-pandemic night that lodged itself in my brain for good: loud, sweaty, and electric in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding like every other person telling an “I saw them when” story.

The 2019 show was beautiful chaos. I was just shy of 30 and for the first time in a long time I had to hand my glasses to a friend so I could properly throw down in the pit. I remember the band crowd-surfing, I remember them just whipping open cans of beer at the audience, people hanging from the rafters, and the band casually hanging around the bar afterward like none of it was a big deal. Of course, it was a big deal to those of us there to witness it. By the time I saw them at again at The Vic in Chicago in 2022, it was clear I was never going to see Amyl And The Sniffers in a Cactus Club-sized room again.

So in a weird way, Summerfest felt like a natural Milwaukee progression. You play the smaller room, you make enough locals lose their minds, and eventually you end up at the Big Gig grounds. Amyl And The Sniffers made their entrance to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” Friday night, which played like the funniest possible WWE walkout music, then immediately started throwing punches. From there, it was a hard-charging 90 minutes of volume, F-bombs, headbanging, and Amy Taylor barking at the crowd in that thick Australian accent that somehow makes every song feel even more alive.

The setlist hit all its marks, with my personal favorites being “U Should Not Be Doing That,” from 2024’s Cartoon Darkness; “Guided By Angels”; and the snarling ripper “GFY,” whose lyrics feel especially poignant given how I feel about people in power these days. Other highlights included “Security,” “Starfire 500,” and my forever favorite, “Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled),” which is still guaranteed to give me goosebumps and make me bounce around like a dweeb on a pogo stick. Even “Big Dreams,” one of the band’s rare slower moments, gave the set a needed breather without killing the momentum.

Between songs, the band cracked jokes about the U.S. beating Australia in a World Cup match earlier that day, then noted that the same bullshit politics happening here are happening back home, too. Maybe that’s part of why Australian punk feels so dialed into the moment right now. Different hemisphere, same bad vibes, same need to scream through it.

Maybe I’m sick with nostalgia, and maybe there’s nothing particularly healthy about that. But I’ll always connect Amyl And The Sniffers back to that Cactus Club show, even if the energy of that night was never going to be repeated. It couldn’t be, and it shouldn’t have to be. What mattered last night at Summerfest was that a much bigger Milwaukee crowd got to experience the explosion of energy this band can bring to a performance: bloody-knuckles rock and roll that feels primal, joyful, and needed. Amyl And The Sniffers were fucking excellent, and Summerfest was better for having them.