DITZ – Never Exhale


“Grey skies gonna clear up, let’s put on a happy face,” sings DITZ’s C.A. Francis in the taut, punchy first verse of “Space/Smile,” the first single from Never Exhale. It doesn’t take that close or observant a listen to pick up on the implicit irony therein, like when Nirvana kicked off “Territorial Pissings” with their own pisstake on The Youngbloods’ “Get Together.” But it’s not quite that simple, as anyone who’s heard the band’s barnburning take on Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” can attest. Francis’ invocation to dance together and drink from the same cup immediately thereafter feels like a genuine olive branch in a swirling tempest of a song, its urgency and intensity ramping up steadily throughout its minute and 48 seconds and Francis’ harried bark on the verge of a panic attack. Maybe grey skies are going to clear up, but it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
Formed in 2015—shortly before the year that the Brexit referendum passed and Trump was elected president (the first time)—Brighton’s DITZ came together as a means of catalyzing something powerful out of a universal truth: “people like being pissed off.” And at their highest decibel level, DITZ are pissed—a force of nature harnessed by pummeling rhythms, dissonant riffs and Francis’ furious roar, perhaps the best instrument in their arsenal.
The band’s 2022 debut album The Great Regression introduced them as a singular force in British noise rock, juxtaposing a dark sense of humor with an even more palpable kind of darkness, sculpting their primal scream through post-hardcore grooves and eruptions of noise rock menace. Their sophomore album Never Exhale, the obstacle-ridden making of which they referred to as a “proper pain in the arse,” is more ambitious and streamlined, offering moments of ominous subtlety alongside their explosive bursts of volume. Even at their most accessible, like on the ominous disco strut of “Taxi Man,” the group always finds a darker avenue to slip through, Francis muttering in its chorus, “...So I get back into the car and I tell him to keep on driving.”
Never Exhale is rife with explosive moments of catharsis wrought from malaise and existential panic, balancing twisted internal monologues with eruptions of noise and dissonance. On the tense and brooding “Senor Sinestro” Francis confesses “I feel like death,” only to turn that around and ponder, “I wonder if he feels like me too.” Amid the cacophonous barrage of “God On Speed Dial,” he feels not like death but Josef K, with “more lives than a cat does,” a cruel irony to endure each trial he’s put through. But then again, the noise and dissonance in these songs is a satisfying end in itself, whether through the furious and focused, one-chord sandpaper disco on “Four” or the searing, squealing riffs of “18 Wheeler.”
DITZ rarely put the listener through their eerie gauntlet without arriving upon some manner of climactic release, but on the rare slow-burner like “Smells Like Something Died In Here,” that long lurch into hell is even more effective. It’s another song that seems sardonic on the surface, but in its harrowing progression, it quickly becomes clear that a very real sense of death permeates every corner of this terrifying dirge: “Nothing’s gonna grow, nothing can be sown.” Like the greats of noise rock before them, DITZ invite us to get a whiff, to witness the discomfort and fear for ourselves. When that climax finally arrives, it feels earned—endure the rot and the fear, and you can scream your head off. As a treat.
Label: Republic of Music
Year: 2025
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Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.