It’s a lazy autumn afternoon, and NME are squeezed outside the front of Manchester venue Gorilla, smoking rollies with Bathing Suits. Tonight, they’ll open for Man/Woman/Chainsaw, but traffic means the band are late for the interview, and now, our location is slightly compromised. Locals wielding loudspeakers whizz past on bikes, buses honk, and passersby audibly grimace at the fugs of cigarette smoke. The soundscape is so fucked that everyone has to take turns with the recorder to be heard, which gives the whole conversation the vibe of a team-building exercise.
The disorder is fitting: submitting to noise is what Bathing Suits are all about. Since forming in Leeds in 2024, the fast-rising four-piece have harrowed venues and DIY spaces across the country with their singular brand of industrial freak pop, which, the band tell NME with a trace of contempt, often gets pigeonholed as “Idles if they were brat” or “Gilla Band if they looked good”. “They don’t look bad!” frontwoman Freyja Blevins laughs, the sun catching her blonde hair. Guitarist Alex Mulholland quips back: “We once got asked what the words post-industrial trance mean to us, and I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
To NME’s ears, they sound a little like ‘Confusion Is Sex’-era Sonic Youth or Suicide if they were into Kesha and Bassvictim – check the incendiary, Estelle-sampling stomper ‘I Can Be a Freak’, their biggest song yet, which was recently remixed to feature Mandy, Indiana’s Valentine Caulfield. The trance thing works fine, too.
In an era where musicians are burdened with virality and self-definition as soon as they even think about writing a song, Bathing Suits are part of an exciting cohort of UK bands rediscovering meaning in the tension between destruction and reconstruction, and doing so outside any industrial PR complex. But as they shift from local heroes to scene luminaries, the group have had to tone down the live shows a tad – or, at the very least, stop starting punch-ups on stage.
“Yeah, we had to stop doing that,” bassist Elise Hughes confirms, smirking a little. “I think George broke a pedal. My amp fell off a huge stool. All our clothes were ripped and shit.” “Our shit is still breaking all the time,” guitarist George Dickinson quips, tucking long brown hair behind his ears. Hughes agrees: “I completely destroyed my bass at our gigs in France this week, so it’s still in the shop. It’s literally on life support right now.”
The band – who are all in their early twenties – are a motley crew, all with their own unique energy but a shared sense of silliness. Sometimes they seem more interested in the eccentric characters that trickle down the street than the interview. On bass is Hughes, originally from Sunderland, who sways menacingly onstage to earth-shaking basslines. Dickinson, who hails from Hadfield, a small town outside Manchester, and Milton Keynesian Mulholland share guitar duties, trading riffs that are defined by their atonality and effects-heavy qualities.
Then there’s vocalist, drum machine operator and frontwoman Blevins, who grew up in Peterborough, where she was “the weird gay kid”, and can now be found stripping onstage or diving into crowds, only identifiable by streaks of long, bleach-blonde hair. She models, has been photographed by Hedi Slimane, and only puts her sunglasses on when we move inside the venue. Her canny knack for a clubland hook and singular stage presence – which sits somewhere between Boudica and Donita Sparks – are key parts of Bathing Suits’ charm. For Blevins and the rest of the band, audience/performer barriers don’t exist: breaking them down is a way of reclaiming the act of looking. “Part of the performance for me is watching them, and I think that they all forget that,” Hughes laughs.
“We’re shoving abrasive sounds into a pop format. If we could have a mission statement, it would be that” – Alex Mulholland
If anything, the four are united by their mutual love for the sense of community that outsider-ish music affords. The roaming frontwoman thing is cool conceptually, but it also recontextualises what it means to be alienated, something close to Blevins’ heart: “I think [being an outsider] is why I make the music that I make,” she says. For the band, that camaraderie was fostered by Leeds’ frenetic DIY scene. Hughes, Mulholland, and Dickinson met at uni there and started a promotion company called Wisecrack, putting on fringe music shows, including one featuring Blevins’ old band. Hughes and Blevins bonded over A.G. Cook-founded label PC Music, and quickly began playing music together.
They owe early gigs to Leeds’ “favours economy”, Mulholland says, citing a “dodgy deal” with fellow Loiners Normal Village, which involved rigging a battle of the bands at Irish pub chain O’Neill’s and splitting the cash prize across the two bands, whoever won. “There was a group of 70-year-old women having a birthday party at the corner of the room, and they were all singing: ‘I can be a freak!’” Blevins says.
The live shows “are the most important part of it all,” Blevins says. Whether Bathing Suits are performing in front of pensioners or sweaty teenage moshers with vape-induced asthma, audiences should “expect chaos”. “Chaos”, it turns out, might be a bit of an understatement – at a standout show at this year’s The Great Escape festival in Brighton, Blevins scaled the rigging above the stage before ripping through the audience. Performing and destruction is a singular, ritualistic experience for the band: to Blevins it feels like sex; to everyone else it’s a fight-or-flight situation. “It’s good if I’ve had a really shit week, and then I just get to punch my guitar, and then I feel a bit better,” Mulholland says.
Their gigs shape the songs, too. Each of the five tracks on their debut EP, ‘Kill Bathing Suits’, released in April, were written while performing, which gives them an edge beyond any confrontational genre tags. Listen to the rhythmic interactions between instruments on ‘Relay’, or the anxious build of ‘Empathy’. The latter track is their set closer, and congeals into feedback and noise. Several fans, presumably here for the slightly less harsh headliners Man/Woman/Chainsaw, look mortified.
For what it’s worth, Bathing Suits are probably as interested in pop music, they say, as in any piercing screams or clanging guitars. Their biggest track is centred around an Estelle lyric, and they say they used to cover Kesha at their early gigs. “I think pop as a whole has inspired everything about my stage presence,” Blevins argues. Mulholland agrees: “We’re shoving abrasive sounds into a pop format. If we could have a mission statement, if we could be pegged down to one thing, it would be that.”
More Bathing Suits derangement will arrive later this month. Their next missive comes in the form of a grimy dance track that’s made subtly unnerving through the ways in which the band lean further into dynamic tension. It all points to a lowkey evolution in their sound, they say. “We’re still noisy, but we want to know how to control the noise,” Blevins explains. “We want to have it as a tool. We don’t want the noise to control us. We want to control the noise.”
New music from Bathing Suits will arrive later this month.
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