Bathing Suits are bringing deranged noise-punk to the dancefloor

I t’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.”

T he 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