‘Knifey’: The Amyl and the Sniffers song that shouldn’t have to be written
2024 was the year when Amyl and the Sniffers truly took flight from down under. The Melbournite four-piece are such a force to be reckoned with in the current state of rock music play, and there’s no doubt that they’ll only continue to rise from here. A huge part of the reason behind this is the refreshingly dark depths to which lead vocalist Amy Taylor dares to delve in her lyrical explorations, and there’s no song which showcases that better than ‘Knifey’.
The track, taken from 2021 sophomore album Comfort to Me, is the direct sonic confrontation of a frighteningly familiar affair for women and minorities across Australia and indeed the world – the fear of being attacked while walking home at night. In many ways it was Taylor’s own response to that shadow over the shoulder – as well as instances of other attack victims who endured much more horrifying fates – that prompted her to consider the double standard of violence that ‘Knifey’ depicts.
“It’s about my experience — and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience — of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you,” she explained to Apple Music. In this context the maturing into womanhood is emblematic – the comfort and protection once provided by a teddy bear is replaced with a knife, and yet it still doesn’t make the pit in the stomach ever truly go away.
“All I ever wanted was to walk by the park/ All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars,” Taylor repeatedly pleads before resorting to “Out comes the night, out comes my knifey/ This is how I get home nicely […] But you still fuck me up.” On one hand it’s a damning cry of desperation, the other a declaration of war on the femicide state of affairs – but if one thing’s for certain, Taylor is marking herself as a martyr to a cause that should never have to exist.
Much of Taylor’s overt anger in the song is clearly channelled in her awakening to the world of misogyny at all too young an age. She continued: “I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife’, and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively.”
But even with that stark statement, she too was aware of the untreaded ground that ‘Knifey’ was breaking. “At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about,” Taylor admitted, striking that in spite of her brazenness, that innate fear has obviously never left her.
If such a thing as counterculture still exists in the 2020s, Amyl and the Sniffers are definitely the spearheads of it. But more than just being a tour-de-force of pub rock, they are also the ones daring to expose taboo and ultimately thrive in the pleasure of our writhing discomfort at the images they evoke. ‘Knifey’ may be unnerving to admit, but it is the sonic lifting of the veil to every woman’s darkest instincts.
