Ellie Livingston leans on the glass frontage of an almost empty laundromat. Washed out by the half-alive glow of neon strip lights, she sparks a cigarette and slips on a pair of earphones. Then, she picks up her sword and heads inside. The opening seconds of the video for ’s ‘Throw Yourself To The Sword’ tell you almost everything you need to know about this furiously exciting, genre-mashing Austin band – they’re here to break apart the stultifying air of your day-to-day, and they’ll do it their way.
Die Spitz on The Cover of NME. Credit: Pooneh Ghana for NME
The only thing bigger than the guitarist and vocalist’s weapon in the clip is the song’s riff – a full-bore sludge-fest driven on by ruthlessly efficient drums and her sandpaper scream. In this moment, Die Spitz are a killer metal band, but they don’t stay in any one lane for long. “You can go through life making yourself out to be a person who can be fantastical and do something amazing,” she says. “If you’re working as a server, which I’ve done for a long time, if you’re in school, if you’re whatever, you can rise against it as long as you’re willing to let yourself try.”
Reflecting that belief, their debut album ‘Something To Consume’ darts between styles with brutish energy and a sense of anarchic fun. At times, it feels like you’re a teenager discovering synapse-fizzing sounds all over again as they pinwheel between punk, shoegaze and classic rock. “It was important to showcase a little bit of everything that we want to do moving forward,” bassist Kate Halter says. “And to have the freedom of doing whatever the fuck we want, basically.”
“I love to feel a wave of emotions, not one thing – that’s really important to the direction of this band” – Ellie Livingston
Their sound is not one person trying on different hats, desperately trying to impress you by listing how many records they own. Instead, it’s an example of genuine buy-in and enthusiasm by the quartet – all four songwriters in their own right, and three of them vocalists – when confronted with another person’s creative mores.
In the run-up to ‘Throw Yourself To The Sword’ on the LP’s tracklist, Ava Schrobilgen fronts the appropriately titled, Basement-meets-Gits rager ‘Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)’ and Chloe De St. Aubin leads the windingly melodic, almost Violent Femmes-y indie-rock of ‘Voir Dire’. As well as singing, both have a roving role in the band, switching between guitar and drums when required, spinning plates in a maelstrom. “We didn’t think it would work out this well with all these different sounds,” Schrobilgen says. “But we bring the songs to each other, and we have the freedom of creativity from everybody. Rather than Chloe’s song or Ellie’s song, it’s a Die Spitz song.”
Ellie Livingston of Die Spitz. Credit: Pooneh Ghana for NME
‘Something To Consume’ also hangs together better than it ever should because of the bone-deep chemistry between the quartet. On the surging ‘Red 40’ and ‘Riding With My Girls’, their camaraderie seems impenetrable, like being confronted with a collective ‘fuck you’ from a bunch of people in their bulletproof early-twenties. It’s also deeply aspirational. You want to be a part of their team, headbanging at the lip of the stage as Livingston stomps a fuzz pedal half to death with a red cowboy boot. “I think that’s the foundation of friendship underneath our band – the collaboration that comes from that closeness,” Schrobilgen adds.
The roots of that friendship run deep. Halter, Livingston and Schrobilgen have been tight since they were kids, and began playing music together in what would become Die Spitz when Covid ran roughshod over the usual avenues teenagers have to spend time together. In a recent interview with the Line of Best Fit, they described De St. Aubin’s introduction almost in terms of pulling someone in from a life lived in parallel — different schools but the same town, same obsessions. “I think we all have similar moral compasses, similar ways of viewing life,” Livingston observes now.
Ava Schrobilgen of Die Spitz. Credit: Pooneh Ghana for NME
Austin’s radical edge – the one that powered venues like Raul’s and bands such as Dicks and Big Boys back when punk was a brand new, malleable idea – might have been sanded down over the years, but the city that gave Die Spitz a leg up is still young and vibrant. A music hive with the air of a small town, its scene complements the quartet’s own magpie approach to sonics by throwing up everything from the febrile power-pop of Gus Baldwin And The Sketch to Portrayal Of Guilt’s gnarly hardcore and Being Dead’s effervescently odd indie-rock. “It’s a great place to start a band,” Halter says. “Music is such a big thing, but it’s not oversaturated.”
“There’s a very small scene of people our age, born and raised here, who are all in each other’s bands,” Schrobilgen observes. “We call it bandcest. They would play college parties, and we would go when we were in high school. We would see these people, these guys, playing, and we’d be like, ‘We should do that.’ That was a big inspiration. It’s funny, we thought they were the coolest people in the world, and now they’re like… meh. But there are a lot of really cool bands coming out of Austin – it was very inspiring growing up here and seeing live music at all points of your life. It’s almost like our parents were like, ‘You’re gonna be in a band… you’re gonna be in a band.’”
“[The band] are my teachers in a lot of ways” – Ava Schrobilgen
Die Spitz came out of the gate at a hundred miles per hour, their early EPs stocked with louche, scuzz-bound rock songs and lurid imagery that grew extra legs on stage thanks to the band’s blend of thrift-store cool and brazen, teeth-loosening volume. But ‘Something To Consume’ takes everything a step further. All great debut albums capture a moment in time, mainlining nerve-jangling excitement and a sense of possibility, but only some of them manage to convincingly map out all the places a band might go after the last note fades. This is one of them.
At each turn, its muscular confidence and unfailing directness when changing focus suggest that Die Spitz could go anywhere and do anything, with crucial new voices falling into the spaces they’ve just vacated. They are a band that makes kids want to start a band. “I think having that diversity makes an album timeless,” Livingston says. “I love to feel a wave of emotions, not one thing. I think that’s really important to me and the direction of this band — there’s nothing wrong with this, but we’re not a straight, all-girl punk band. That’s what we get called a lot, and I don’t want to get put in that box.”
Kate Halter of Die Spitz. Credit: Pooneh Ghana for NME
Recorded with producer Will Yip, whose work with Mannequin Pussy, Nothing and Scowl seems to cover a decent amount of Die Spitz’s existing real estate, the record sounds huge, but it deliberately doesn’t sound in any way clean, precious or formulaic. You can see the dirt beneath the fingernails of every riff, glom onto the intention behind each rib-cracking kick-snare hit. “Some of the albums he’s produced are my favourites of all time – I’m a huge Title Fight fan,” Livingston says. “He made it big. It needed to be big.”
At every available opportunity, they also ramp up the chaos and theatre, adding an appropriately visceral dimension to lyrics that already read as all-consuming. In their hands, love is a dependency, apathy a lurking threat. On ‘Voir Dire’, perhaps the record’s most outwardly political song, it’s like De St. Aubin is done with it all, crushed by the rinse-repeat machinations of late-stage capitalism and American politics in protecting the dudes at the very top at all costs. “It’s easy just to fade / Disappear into the dim-lit corner that you’ve made,” she sings.
Chloe De St. Aubin of Die Spitz. Credit: Pooneh Ghana for NME
But a counterpoint comes as the hook is held up, once again, by four people in a room together, making something out of nothing. “I wrote that to extend a perspective,” she says, reflecting on wanting to invite people to feel some of the band’s tight-knit solidarity bleeding from the speakers. That is a sentiment that her bandmates are quick to get behind. “They [the band] are my teachers in a lot of ways,” Schrobilgen adds. “They’re all very smart, and we like to drink a bunch of sake and then talk about politics. It’s preaching to the choir, pretty much, but sometimes it’s fun to just scream.”
“We’re not riot grrrl, it’s not my agenda and it’s not why I started this band, but it’s almost impossible to look the other way,” Livingston says. “‘Down on It’ is about that – feeling trapped and not knowing what you should do, what you can do. That can lead to depression and crazy anxiety. If you’re not thinking about it, maybe you just don’t want to exist in a reality where things are hard for other people – you only want to be selfish.”
As we talk, the members of Die Spitz are sitting in spots they won’t be seeing for a while. Halter holds one of her dogs on her lap, its tongue lolling, and Livingston fusses with her cat. Having already opened for a suitably diverse slate of bands, including L7, Off! and Amyl And The Sniffers, in a few weeks, they’ll head out for a North American gig supporting Viagra Boys and later their own headline run, which is rapidly becoming a sold-out affair. ‘What next?’ is a big question, but they’ve got friends on hand to help them answer it. “I think it’s always smart to undershoot your expectations,” Schrobilgen says. “But, honestly, I could do exactly this for the rest of my life.”
Die Spitz’s ‘Something to Consume’ is out September 12 on Third Man Records.
Listen to Die Spitz’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Huw Baines
Photography: Pooneh Ghana
Label: Third Man Records
