Ditz at The White Hotel

For DITZ, the recording of a song is just one version of it. The Brighton five-piece routinely play new material live for years before it’s tracked in the studio, tweaking it every tour, so the version that eventually reaches a DAW is just the one that’s currently in favour.

That’s how they arrived at 2025’s Never Exhale, the follow-up to 2022’s The Great Regression, which Pitchfork called “a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore” – a record born, like everything they make, between tour dates, in borrowed rehearsal rooms across Europe. The original plan was to record it in Rhode Island, but that fell through when the band took a support slot with IDLES instead, and what they ended up committing to tape – at Holy Mountain studios in London, during a freezing January – sounds like the boiled-up intensity of its own long gestation.

Punk, post-hardcore, noise rock, whatever you want to call this genre, it rarely gets such thoughtful lyricism. Across the record Cal Francis finds himself imagining a taxi driver as a Charon-like figure, ferrying the dead into the underworld, elsewhere contemplating “The body as a structure / Abstracted from the mind”, and, in a song about ageing, wondering whether death feels like him, if he feels like death. As the band themselves say, “It’s political, but ultimately personal. More Genet or Kafka than Orwell or Huxley.”

This heavy material is barked more than sung over primal arrangements of careening guitars, which grind against each other in constant, unresolved collision, on top of a rhythm section – Caleb Remnant’s bass, Sam Evans’s drums – that remorselessly grooves onwards. There’s a queasy industrial noise everywhere, with The Jesus Lizard and Shellac cited as two longtime touchstones, while the closing, trance-like ‘britney’ reaches towards the crushing atmospherics of Mogwai – a sign, perhaps of things to come.

Support on 15 October comes from Bathing Suits, a Leeds four-piece who deal in a similarly physical mix of abrasive guitar and industrial noise, but also shaped by the local DIY electronic scene they grew up in. We caught them at Sounds From The Other City, where they were a highlight of our day, very much living up to their own mantra of “Always dancey, always loud, always sexy.”