Bathing Suits have just wrapped their debut show at London’s Lexington and frontwoman Freyja Blevins is dripping water and sweat, dressed only in the bottom half of her peach illusion bathing suit. Blonde, 6ft 6in and svelte, she has spent the last 40 minutes thrashing manically on stage, as if Ian Curtis’s ghost had suddenly possessed a supermodel’s body (she has recently been contacted about modelling, though she’s reluctant after watching Reality Check). “I feel good,” she says politely, slinking backstage. A 50-something fan ambles past. “That was fucking heavy.”
Bathing Suits are a fresh-faced four-piece from Leeds, working somewhere between electroclash, post-punk, noise rock and rave. “We get compared to Nine Inch Nails a lot,” says 20-year-old guitarist Alex Mulholland, “which is weird, because we don’t really listen to them. Somebody else said we’re Gen-Z’s Throbbing Gristle.” But they describe themselves less referentially: “always dancey, always loud and always sexy.”
Backstage, they’re just like any other up-and-coming group. They met studying a smorgasbord of creative subjects at university, coming together when their previous bands fell apart. They all work part-time hospitality jobs, but have always seen music as their future. They dress in a pick-and-mix of skinny jeans, Doc Martens, band tees and Catholic regalia. And for Christmas, they celebrated together by buying as many fancy cheeses on Boxing Day discount as possible then making an elaborate dairy platter, an anecdote I hear bassist Elise Hughes recounting at least twice in her charming north-east drawl.
Also like any other up-and-coming band, Bathing Suits relate to the feeling of being an outsider. Freyja grew up in Peterborough – a “nothing” commuter town an hour outside London – and was bullied as “the weird gay kid” in a small-minded city. One time, she was outside Sainsbury’s when an older woman started chucking pennies at her for no other reason than looking different. “I was only 13.”
These experiences seep into her lyricism, which can be both liberatory and callous. Luscious party track ‘I Can Be a Freak’ is a polyvalent, amphetamined ode to Estelle, who Freyja “loves”. New release ‘Empathy’ is a malevolent and abrasive wall of sound, punctuated by quasi-demonic chants of “just lack empathy.” During their playtime, they sonically travel all the way from Björk (“I was listening to her on the way here,” says Freyja) to KAVARI to Merzbow. Bathing Suits, it seems, are a band of multitudes.
‘Empathy’’s callousness, of course, is a façade. Bathing Suits are still in the fans-equal-friends stage of early stardom, and interviewing them in the Lexington’s smoking area, where Freyja goes with Vogues and tap water, the others rollies and cheap lager, is made an impossibility by the conveyor belt of hometown friends, Windmill acquaintances and London acolytes who jump in to hype them up or congratulate them on the insanity of the performance. They’re all more than happy to oblige, and it’s hard to be mad – all the fangirling is very well-deserved.
“We’ve had to tone down our performances,” says George Dickinson, also on guitars, pre-show. The decision came after one mythic gig where the band wrecked everything onstage, expensive equipment included. Another victim of the beatdown was Alex’s forearm, which was left with a massive gash after Freyja, a foot taller than him, took him by the tie and swung him around the venue like a marionette. Alex rolls up his sleeve to show me the healed injury, evidently a badge of pride, and huffs in faux outrage. “My mum was there to watch that.”
