After 40 missed calls from “The Boogeyman,” curiosity got the better of Chloe De St. Aubin.
“I was like, all right, I’ve got to answer,” she recalls. On the other end of the line came three shrieking voices: “Chloeeeeee! Chloeeeeeee!” The Boogeyman, it turned out, wasn’t some faceless ghoul. It was Kate Halter’s Instagram handle. Halter, along with bandmates Eleanor Livingston and Ava Schrobilgen, had decided mid- COVID delirium (“the OG strain”) that De St. Aubin simply had to be in their band.
The members of Austin’s Die Spitz are recounting their origin story, all outfitted in double denim and passing around a flimsy joint as golden hour sets in over Los Angeles. Halter, the band’s resident troll, is eager to correct the Boogeyman anecdote with her own version of events.
“Actually, we were chosen by Simon Cowell to be together, just like One Direction.” As they tell it, the weirdness only continued when they met De St. Aubin in person. “We thought she was going to be tall and 30,” says Livingston. “But she was, like, four feet tall,” Schrobilgen adds.
The first Die Spitz song to come out of that mayhem was called “Fish Fillet.” “It sounded like shit in my butt,” Halter admits. Livingston jumps in: “I’m just proud we don’t sound like that anymore.”
Nowadays, not unlike their chaotic banter, seeing Die Spitz live is like witnessing a kind of ecstatic disorder. They collapse and reform their songs, swapping instruments mid-set amid feedback and laughter. They sound like a thrash-metal band one minute and something entirely different the next — jagged alt-rock, snotty punk or melodic grunge — guided not by plan but by instinct. And in short order, they’ve become one of the most combustible live acts on the circuit.
That same volatility powers Die Spitz’s full-length debut, Something to Consume. Recorded with producer Will Yip (Mannequin Pussy, Nothing, Scowl), the album sounds huge but never over-polished — all grit and sweat beneath the riffs. The quartet’s collective energy is baked in the performances: De St. Aubin and Schrobilgen trade off on lead vocals, drums and guitars, Livingston taps in on guitar and lead vocals, and Halter holds down the bass. Standout single “Throw Yourself to the Sword” is a perfect distillation of that unruly spirit, its violent, gleefully unhinged video capturing the band’s mix of humor, heaviness and total abandon. It’s easy to see why Die Spitz are capturing people’s attention.
Signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records, they’ve already toured with Amyl and the Sniffers, OFF! and Sleater-Kinney, and hit major fests including Bonnaroo. And their rise is only accelerating. In 2026, they’ll open for the Foo Fighters at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool, and play Coachella, Download, Hellfest and more. Through it all, Die Spitz’s music still feels like the product of shared adrenaline: wild, joyful and faintly bewildered, as if they can’t quite believe what they’ve built together.
It’s a long way from their parents’ garages where they first practiced — but Livingston pleads, “Please don’t call us a garage band.” Their first gigs were in tiny Austin clubs, through bookers desperate to fill empty slots. “That helped us get over the jitters,” Schrobilgen says. The live show came before the proficiency. “We weren’t good when we started,” she admits.
It didn’t take long for Die Spitz’s shows to develop a cultish energy. They’ve yet to play one without a mosh pit. Regulars show up in handmade shirts. Creeps, unfortunately, show up with cameras. “You can always spot them,” Livingston sighs. “They stand in the front, film the whole set and don’t move.”
They relish singing their snarling, riff-heavy anthem “American Porn” to the exact demographic they’re skewering: the creeps. In it, Schrobilgen distills a lifetime of complicated ambivalence — what it means to perform and be seen as a woman — into a single line: “Your struggle is beauty, your beauty is mine.”
“That’s one of my proudest lyrics,” she says. “It’s about how people want to see you struggle. That’s what makes the headlines. When you’re finally happy or healthy, no one cares. ‘Your struggle is beauty. And your beauty is mine.’ It’s that feeling that people own you because you’re in public.”
The song also fires back at their critics, the ones who dismiss them as “hot girls with guitars.” “That’s literally something people have said to us,” says Schrobilgen. “Like, ‘They suck but they’re hot.’ We wouldn’t have sold out our show without having boobs, apparently.” She laughs, a little tiredly. “That’s pretty usual in this industry.”
When asked if there’s ever a part of them that wishes to be invisible, the mood shifts. “Every time I have to do a photo shoot,” De St. Aubin says, “I’m like, ‘I’m gonna freak out.’” She begins singing Elliott Smith’s “Pictures of Me,” a song about exactly that feeling, and the rest of them join in. Livingston talks about the unease of constant public scrutiny — and how she’s fought to make peace with her insecurities while learning to live with the exposure that comes with being in a band. “I feel privileged to do this,” she says, “but it’s hard to look at yourself all the time, to be compared all the time.”
Schrobilgen nods. “It’s especially draining as a woman. I love that we’re all women. I want girls to see us and think I can do that — but it’s still exhausting.”
“Yeah,” De St. Aubin adds quietly. “Sometimes I just wish it were OK to be, like, a dude in a band. Just do my thing.”
Die Spitz’s music carries that same despondent undercurrent. For all the fun-loving, irreverent energy they project in interviews — conversations that often dissolve into inside jokes and pratfalls — their songs tackle a range of heavy subjects, from substance abuse to the strange hunger for approval. Their laughter, it seems, is a kind of release valve. When asked if they make fun of themselves first out of fear that someone else might beat them to it, Halter just laughs. “How did you know?” she says.
There is a sense of protection in couching themselves inside the joke. They say they get too hungover to party much anymore. Instead, they throw “pretend parties,” where they do “pretend drugs and listen to Mumford & Sons,” says Halter — while smoking actual weed, knowing what she says sounds like a joke, but probably isn’t.
Despite the antics, there’s a tenderness among them that borders on devotional. They finish each other’s jokes and interrupt each other constantly. But when one speaks about family, the others go still. “I grew up distant from people my whole life until I met you,” says De St. Aubin.
The room softens. Even Halter, the habitual clown, goes quiet. “I feel like I had internalized misogyny before this band,” Livingston says. “Maybe I still do, somewhere. But this band definitely helped me push through that.”
Die Spitz bury this off-the-cuff sincerity inside their constant clowning. It’s part of what makes the Motörhead-esque “RIDING WITH MY GIRLS” hit so hard. “Some people say the lyrics aren’t deep,” Schrobilgen says. “But that song says everything I want it to say: I’m with my girls, I’m going to be OK. We can get through anything together.”
That line — riding with my girls — isn’t shallow. It’s shorthand for an entire emotional education. To call the lyric simple is to misunderstand the depth of girlhood itself, how it takes a lifetime to negotiate on its confusing terms. For Die Spitz, it’s taken one another to make peace with girlhood.
As a four-piece, they’re electric, loud and giddy. “Apart, not so much so,” Livingston admits, laughing. On their own, each one is a little shy, but together they become a collective organism, some glittering, shrieking thing that feeds on its own chaos. They bring out each other’s freak. What looks like euphoria onstage is, more accurately, relief — the joy of being permitted to exist exactly as they are.
“There’s no relationship in my life that feels like this,” De St. Aubin says, then pauses. “Actually, my older sister and I are really close, now. We share clothes, stay up all night talking.” She looks at the others. “Being friends with y’all made me a better sister.”
In learning how to be a band, they’ve learned how to be people: how to stay, how to listen, how to keep showing up. Maybe that’s what sisterhood is in the end — not a matter of blood but of endurance, of deciding again and again to be known.