Die Spitz - Something To Consume Review
Die Spitz enrapture with a dark, hot-blooded journey through punk and metal and the violence of the personal and political on Something To Consume.
I spend a good part of my weekend on a cross-country train, torrential rain battering the carriages as we skirt a grey, unforgiving coastline. I flick between media, interchangeably answering emails, reading news updates about someone shooting someone else in the neck, and thrashing zombies to death on my boyfriend’s Nintendo. The sound track to my journey is, fittingly, Something To Consume, the debut album from Austin-bred rock quartet, Die Spitz.
The album’s cover art (designed by fellow Austinite Kylie Bly) - an earth-toned image of contorted bodies, some of them with bloodied teeth, cannibalising the other figures - is a neat visual summary of the work: swampy and host to aesthetics of rage and torment. There is something putrid in the world, Die Spitz say, and then try out various ways of coping with it. It’s important to note that Die Spitz as we now know it - made up of childhood friends Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St Aubin, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter - is only in its gurgling infancy, formed in 2022. They talk of starting the band after a late night viewing of Mötley Crüe movie The Dirt - a poorly reviewed biopic of the 1980s heavy-metal group. The bandmates are each 22 years old, emerging from a dynamic (and often star-making) music scene in their hometown.
Something To Consume is a graduation from the group’s 2023 EP ‘Teeth’ - the sound is layered, heavy and full - it’s loud and barbed, but varied enough to avoid feeling abrasive. Part of this comes from the band’s collaborative process- the three singles released before the album drop were written by Livingston, Schrobilgen and de St. Aubin respectively, and the album goes even further to demonstrate the versatility the band manage - drifting between hardcore, garage-punk, shoe gaze, and metal - while maintaining a recognisable and cohesive sound. The band’s vocals are charged and daredevil, soaring in and out of dominance with guitar wails and crashing drums. ‘We wanted to showcase a little bit of everything that we want to do moving forward’ bassist Kate Halter explained to NME.
The album enmeshes the personal and political, zooming in and out from the violences of the state to those of interpersonal relationships.’Why should I stay here? Is this it? / is this all we’ll have’? Livingston cries on ‘Sound to No One’. There’s a tension between apathy and action that is most effectively visualised in ‘Voir Dire’, a deceptively clean-sounding track that weighs the desire for ‘creature comforts’ against anarchy in the face of American globalism: ‘throw your comforts away / there’s blood in every street that we walk through on the way.’
Die Spitz cite Black Sabbath, Pixies and PJ Harvey as inspirations, and the album’s sound, produced and engineered by Will Yip of Turnstile and Mannequin Pussy fame, holds twists and turns. ‘Throw Yourself to the Sword’ is a punchy third track showcasing Livingston’s mastery of thrash guitar, ‘Go Get Dressed’ a shoe-gazing pause: ‘fall asleep to nothing, wake up in her room’ - a moment of quiet between storms.
What holds it all together is in part the band’s palpable energy - there’s no disaffectedness, this is music made by a group that really care. Also keeping the record on the rails is an elusive but consistent narrative thread of obsessive desire. The album yanks the listener into Die Spitz’s world with the guitar-driven crash of the record’s first track - ‘Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)’ with the lines ‘How are you feeling? Such a stupid thing to say / I’ve got this obsession / That I haven’t seen since yesterday’ and returns time and time again to the theme - even at the album’s most existential on ‘Sound to No One’, it’s the hook of obsession that pulls the guttural screams from Livingston as she repeats ‘I would follow you anywhere’.
Femininity is important to - but not the be all and end all - of Die Spitz. They foreground feminine identity in their name (die as a fun play on die, obviously, and the German feminine definite article die), but are understandably frustrated at the industry’s predictable collapsing of their identities: “We’re not a straight, all-girl punk band’ Livingston says in a recent NME interview, ‘That’s what we get called a lot, and I don’t want to get put in that box.”
This delicate dance is reflected in the various approaches of the album - ‘RIDING WITH MY GIRLS’ is a surf-punky femme anthem: ‘I can’t help bout the state I’m in / But when I’m with my girls / We gonna win AY’, and ‘American Porn’ is a Hole-esque reflection on the plastic grossness of late-stage American porn-brain. But there’s also a darker, preternatural feminine at play, something underground, hot blooded and fleshy - the final track ‘a strange moon/selenophilia’ evokes the womb of Mother Earth: ‘the moon is far behind us / as we dig into the dirt / it’ll be so warm when I’m with you / at the centre of the earth.’ Die Spitz use their shape-shifting, but female-leaning, identity to touch on all sorts of references, and try on all sorts of hats, with all the riotous joy of teenagers on borrowed guitars in a basement.
Something To Consume is, undeniably, great. Some have suggested they might be ‘the most exciting new rock band on the planet’. Where the album does falter, it’s on the tightness of their writing. There’s a lot of ideas here, but at times the lyricism feels a little scrappy; the various themes are held up for inspection, but not really explored beyond the surface level. It may also, in comparison to ‘Teeth’, be too radio-friendly for some fans. Irregardless, Die Spitz clearly have a world to devour in front of them - talent, power, and an enrapturing attitude to creating loud, brazen art.