From Smashed Gear to Controlled Chaos: Inside Bathing Suits' Noisy Evolution

It opens with a self-deprecating disclaimer: outside Gorilla in Manchester, all four members of Bathing Suits are running late, stuck in traffic. The harmless mishap ends up setting the tone perfectly — this Leeds band has always been known for chaos, and even the commute to an interview comes with a bit of disorder built in.

Vocalist Freyja Blevins, guitarists Alex Mulholland and George Dickinson, and bassist Elise Hughes formed Bathing Suits in Leeds in 2024, quickly carving out a name for themselves with what they call "industrial freak pop" — though they're often lazily tagged as "Idles if they were brat" or "Gilla Band but better-looking." Mulholland seems unimpressed by the labeling: "Someone once asked us what post-industrial trance means to us, and I'm still trying to figure out the answer."

What really got them noticed, though, was the live show. Bathing Suits gigs used to regularly devolve into onstage scuffles and wrecked equipment. "We've had to stop doing that," Hughes says with a wry laugh. "George broke a pedal once, my amp fell off a bar stool, and my clothes got completely ripped apart." Even with the physical chaos dialed back, the gear casualties haven't stopped — just this week in France, Hughes completely blew out her own bass. "It's at the repair shop right now, basically on life support."

The four members hail from Sunderland (Hughes), Hadfield (Dickinson), Milton Keynes (Mulholland), and Peterborough (Blevins), and are all in their early twenties. Hughes, Mulholland, and Dickinson met while at university in Leeds, where they started an underground gig series called Wisecrack. One of those shows booked a band Blevins was in at the time, and that's how they first crossed paths. Hughes and Blevins bonded separately over a shared love of A.G. Cook's label PC Music.

Early gigs mostly came through Leeds' local "favor economy." Mulholland recalls a "sketchy deal" with fellow Loiners band Normal Village: the two acts rigged a fake battle of the bands at the Irish pub chain O'Neill's, then split the prize money afterward. "There was a group of 70-year-old women having a birthday party in the corner, and they were all singing along: I can be a freak!" Blevins remembers.

Bathing Suits' signature track "I Can Be a Freak" samples lyrics from Estelle and was later remixed by Mandy, Indiana's Valentine Caulfield. It's their biggest song to date, and it sums up their sound pretty well — underneath all the noise, there's a pop skeleton holding it together. "We're basically stuffing abrasive sounds into pop structures," Mulholland says. "If you want a one-line mission statement for the band, that's probably it."

Their debut EP *Kill Bathing Suits*, released in April, features five tracks, all written during live shows — including the rhythmically layered "Relay" and closer "Empathy," which eventually dissolves into pure feedback. Earlier this year at The Great Escape festival in Brighton, Blevins climbed up onto the scaffolding above the stage and dove straight into the crowd from up high — for her, the line between stage and audience was never supposed to exist in the first place.

Later this month, Bathing Suits are set to drop a new track — a dance-leaning track with an edge of unease running through it. The band describes it as a subtle sonic shift: "We're still loud," Blevins says. "But we want to figure out how to control the noise. We want noise to be a tool we use, not something that controls us."