DITZ offers a striking picture of what English punk feels like in 2025. The music has absorbed its own offshoots, noise, hardcore, gothic shades, no wave fragments, metal tension and even a thread of electronics, like The Fall and Wire reimagined by musicians who grew up in the nineties. The result creates an atmosphere that hovers between unease and release, tension that slowly swells before it breaks into something cathartic.
Frontman Cal Francis, dressed like a punk rock diva queen straight out of the seventies, spent as much time in the crowd as on the stage. The band built torrents of hypnotic sound, then tore them apart with blasts of noise, shoegazing drift and sudden violence. The crowd responded instantly. Mosh pits opened within seconds and bodies began surfing overhead, including a man in a wheelchair lifted and carried with absolute devotion by the room.
The set leaned heavily on their new album Never Exhale, but the loudest reactions rose for songs from their 2022 debut The Great Regression. By the time the house lights came up, one thing was evident: the future of UK alt rock wears stockings and it crowd surfs.
