“Bigger things/ Bigger dreams/ Bigger fish,” Eleanor Livingston chants on Die Spitz’s new LP, Something to Consume. It’s the bridge to “RIDING WITH MY GIRLS,” a freewheeling, bombastic B-side the singer-guitarist contrasts with the more meaningful, experimental compositions on the hard rock quartet’s first official full-length.
Whereas other moments on the band’s self-described “spooky ass album” leave behind their signature, spunky sound, the barn burner blazes ahead with a carefree, open road storyline and a metalhead guitar riff, much like the other fiery, mosh pit-inducing anthems that have enraptured audiences in Austin and beyond since their formation three and a half years ago.
But that doesn’t make the song a throwaway. You could sum up every moment of Die Spitz’s relatively short, ever-growing career in those six words.
“Bigger things/ Bigger dreams/ Bigger fish.”
“For a long time we were like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this cool tour. We’re doing these cool things. We’re playing these cool shows,'” Livingston explains at Workhorse Bar one August afternoon. “But we weren’t, like, working towards something, or [we thought] something wasn’t going to happen. And now it’s like, ‘Oh, shit. Something might actually happen.'” Recounting the band’s trajectory, she can’t help but emote in real time: “Whoa! Crazy!”
Much has happened already. Childhood friends Livingston, singer/multi-instrumentalist Ava Schrobilgen, and bassist Kate Halter initially began playing music together, from a distance, as a way to hang out during the pandemic. Die Spitz launched in earnest in January 2022, when the trio poached Sludge (now Farmer’s Wife) drummer Chloe De St. Aubin to begin playing shows. Debut EP The Revenge of Evangeline arrived in July of that year, and by the fall, the then-teenagers scored a spot opening for Nineties legends L7 at Levitation.
In-the-know townies charted even more achievements in 2023, in the wake of second EP Teeth. Before they hit drinking age, the band progressed from West Campus co-op performances to local gigs at Hole in the Wall and Hotel Vegas to tours with hardcore supergroup OFF! and Australian punks Amyl and the Sniffers, and even an appearance at Austin City Limits Fest – which Schrobilgen once told the Chronicle she dreamed of, she reminds me, as we sit in a circle at the North Loop dive.
“Yeah, we were definitely just doing it for shits and gigs around the Teeth era,” Halter drawls, sipping a THC cocktail.
Livingston calls the fall 2023 Amyl run a career changer, then points to a performance at Tennessee music festival Bonnaroo this spring as a more recent triumph.
“[That] was what made me be like, ‘Whoa, we’re kind of a cool band!’” she says incredulously.
Sweater Weather
The Revenge of Evangeline and, especially, Teeth – which won the 2023-2024 Austin Music Award for Album of the Year despite its brief runtime – showcased the group’s fuzzy-catchy dichotomy well enough, but extensive touring no doubt best spread the Die Spitz gospel. From the start, the young musicians delivered explosive live shows: Livingston would ditch her guitar to climb rafters like a 1991 Eddie Vedder, or roar her self-possessed lyrics (“I look good with long hair,” she shrugs in “Evangeline”) while perched on Halter’s shoulders. Quickly, the band’s adoring, gender-diverse audience grew; watching from the sidelines, I noted their graduation from the indoor to outdoor Hotel Vegas stage sometime in 2023 as the point of no return.
“I always wondered if there were some shows that we hadn’t played – if we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t, I’m too sick’ – if that would have changed our trajectory in any way,” Livingston says. Schrobilgen drums along on the table to Metallica’s “One,” blasting on the speakers, as her bandmate talks.
Livingston’s probably right. It was at a South by Southwest performance about two years ago, the vocalist shares, that Die Spitz charmed a representative from Jack White’s Third Man Records, even though she was so ill at the time she could barely sing. Something to Consume arrived Sept. 12 via the rock & roll revivalist’s imprint.
The record deal allowed the band to work with dream producer Will Yip for the project, recorded over three weeks this spring.
On how they met Yip, De St. Aubin offers: “We share a lawyer.”
“Attorney,” Livingston corrects. “Lawyer sounds like we did something wrong.”
Yip, the Philadelphia-based boardsman behind Mannequin Pussy’s Patience, Title Fight’s Shed, and Turnstile’s Time & Space, among other 2010s classics, has become the ultimate pop punk producer – one who polishes heavy bands’ guitars until they shine, but still sting.
“I knew he was gonna have the sound that we wanted,” Livingston says. “It’s consumable in the sense that it sounds kind of Title Fighty, Deftones-esque, but it’s not pop, and it’s not small. It feels really big to me.”
“It’s not over-produced, but it’s still professional,” Schrobilgen adds. “It sounds like he knows what he’s doing, but it doesn’t sound like Sabrina Carpenter.”
Beyond its technical prowess – Schrobilgen excitedly describes the rare Big Muff Yip used on Halter’s mixed-high bass, while Halter praises him for obliging her laborious desire to switch notes left and right in the eerie siren song “Sound to No One” – Something to Consume presents a clear development in Die Spitz’s songwriting.
“We had stuff in the vault because we thought it was gonna happen [earlier],” says De St. Aubin, who trades instruments with Schrobilgen to sing her own compositions, of the recording process. But “a lot of it was filler.”
They kept writing, “And when we got to February, we wrote out what we had, and we were like, ‘Alright, there’s no filler,’” she continues. “Thank God. Thank God we waited.”
What changed? “I think ‘Punishers,’” Livingston opines. “It switched up the vibe. It was more like a fall album after that song.”
Halter’s watery bass is indeed front and center on the LP’s third single, a melancholy De St. Aubin anti-love song. Compared to Livingston’s boisterous, chugging first taste “Throw Yourself to the Sword” and Schrobilgen’s tortured, aptly titled follow-up “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay),” De St. Aubin contributes what must be Die Spitz’s prettiest offering to date. “Talk to me, I want to hear about your day,” she sings coolly, recalling Brie Larson’s femme fatale Scott Pilgrim vs. the World rocker Envy Adams. Chunky chords and heavy-hit drums power the track, but its reverb-drenched guitars and earworm “Things like this never go quite right” refrain feel destined for alt-rock radio – or, in 2025, alt-girl social media algorithms.
“I just really have an affinity for Halloween and scary stuff and horror,” laughs the writer. “I hope it gives everyone that kind of warm, sweater weather, pumpkin vibe.”
“That one definitely was a big switch, as well as ‘American Porn,’” Schrobilgen pipes in. “’American Porn’ doesn’t really sound fallish, but it just had that darker twist on it that I think made us less hesitant to make this album a little bit darker sounding.”
“Stay right here, come with me, show and perform/ Shut your mouth, show your face, American porn,” Schrobilgen demands in the record’s choppy fourth track, which she says is about “people sexualizing us – from the perspective of somebody sexualizing us, pretty much – just to show how stupid that is and exactly how they sound doing that.
“I think that helped with us taking more of a political turn in this album,” she asserts.
De St. Aubin’s partially acoustic “Voir Dire” (“They got a two state deal after blowin’ everyone away”) and Livingston’s zigzag-riffed “Down On It” (“Been trying so hard not to give a shit about the state that we’re in”) highlight the songwriters’ topical frustrations.
“I don’t want to use music, ever, as a source of fearmongering. I don’t want to scare people and be like, ‘You’re fucked if you don’t take my side,’” De St. Aubin says of her most opinionated lyrics. “But sometimes I feel…” she chuckles gravely. “It’s also hard, and sometimes things feel very dire.
“I don’t even need everyone to see things through my eyes. There’s no use in that. I wanted people to have their own takes on things,” she continues. “But I do think there is a sense of a dire need to do something. There is urgency. It’s impossible to look away. If you choose to do that, then you are complacent. And I still don’t think fearmongering is a solution. But I just, at the very least, hope people will listen and think about things deeply.”
Other moments on Something to Consume – like atmospheric centerpiece “Go Get Dressed,” which houses the album’s titular phrase – hint at more personal darkness.
“I just need some substance/ Something to consume,” Schrobilgen croaks in the song, over a melancholy arpeggio. Ominous “ooh’s and whooshing sound effects thicken the air before the vocalist continues, “Restrain yourself from living but stay away from death.” It’s a clear reference to self-medication, especially taken in conjunction with the desperate plea “I don’t want it but I need that shit” in its follow-up, “Red40.”
I admit to the songwriter that I can’t tell whether or not the cut, named after the food dye RFK Jr. has sought to ban, is a joke.
She hesitates. “The Red40 is a metaphor for … It’s like being addicted to Red40, so it’s a metaphor for whatever you could get addicted to. But it also is just kinda funny because it’s Red40.
“I always tell people, ‘Oh, it’s just about Hot Cheetos,’” she continues, giggling nervously. “’Don’t look that deep into it. Don’t worry, Mom.’ It is a joke song, but it’s also not.”
Hot Shit
January 2022. After a couple of house shows, Die Spitz played their first real set at Hole in the Wall. I ask them what they remember and accidentally kick-start a laughing fit.
“We knew absolutely nothing about playing live music, so we drove three cars there and brought everything,” Schrobilgen begins. “We brought a PA, we brought a mixer, we brought microphones and mic stands. We didn’t know what monitors were, so –”
“But we brought a monitor,” Livingston interjects.
“We did bring a monitor,” Schrobilgen affirms. “But we didn’t know what they were.”
“I remember checking the email for the advance of the show, like, ‘It doesn’t say there’s gonna be a microphone!’” Halter chuckles. “Why wouldn’t there be a microphone?”
“I do remember the first thing I said,” Livingston says. “I walked onto the stage and someone was like, ‘Oh my God, is her hair a wig?’ And I was like” – she puts on an insufferable frat boy affectation – “’Nah, we’re Die Spitz!’”
Schrobilgen cackles. “We were all just such fucking douchebags back then.”
“And we thought we were hot shit,” Livingston adds. The guitarist recalls focusing on picking out their matching stage outfits – she was big on ties back then – while De St. Aubin digs through her camera roll to show me pictures.
“I was very nervous,” she says, zooming in on her face behind the kit. “I didn’t know these people.”
“We were not anything at all and we thought we were the shit,” Schrobilgen says, embarrassed. “And now that we’re like…” She trails off, but I know what she means. Now they are something. “We’re like, so incredibly insecure.
“You can quote us that we’re sorry – we were such little dickheads back then.”
The trip down memory lane leads, naturally, to tales of underage drinking – these guys were touring before they turned 21, after all. Halter, now 22, shows me her fake ID, which says she was born in 1998.
“Oh my God, you look 13 in that fucking picture,” De St. Aubin gasps.
“I was 14 years old in the Epoch bathroom,” Halter corrects, still smug.
Proud Texans
Die Spitz have embarked on seven tours since Teeth dropped two and a half years ago, Schrobilgen estimates. Right now they’re in the midst of another run opening for Swedish post-punks Viagra Boys, which they’ll follow with a series of headlining dates – including an Oct. 24 stop at Stubb’s, the band’s biggest show yet.
“I’m super nervous for Stubb’s because, all of us being born and raised in Austin, that’s the place you went to see the bands that rolled through town,” Schrobilgen admits. “I have so many memories there, and now we’re headlining it. I’m like, ‘Oh God, I better not fuck this one up.’
It’s a lot of pressure. It’s like everyone you know and their mom is gonna be there.”
How do the musicians feel about their hometown now that they’re seasoned globe-trotters?
“I was definitely getting really sick of Austin – naturally, living somewhere for your whole life – but then when we started touring, we realized that Austin probably is the best city in the United States,” Schrobilgen smiles.
Livingston agrees. “Food? Fucks. Music scene? Fucks.”
De St. Aubin reveals a Pacific Northwest fantasy – “You guys are gonna have to rip me off a tree,” she tells her bandmates – when asked if they’ll ever follow the grand tradition of successful Austin rock stars who leave town for the coastal big leagues, but Schrobilgen speaks for all of them when she declares, “We love Austin with all our hearts and it will always be our home.”
“And one thing about Die Spitz,” Livingston adds, in an exaggerated country accent, “is we’re proud to be Texan.”
By this point our interview has devolved into a free-for-all of “remember when”s and the merits of the Lone Star State. Once we get to H-E-B, the natives have to teach me, originally from Dallas, about Buddy Bucks.
Halter laughs. “We’re telling all these crazy stories of our youth like we’re withered old women [who] have to go to bed by 9.”
It feels that way, De St. Aubin says. “My birthday was on Saturday, right? Dare I day drink. Oh my God. By 7 I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not gonna make it.’ I would’ve been able to do that two years ago.”
“I don’t know about y’all,” Livingston smirks. “I fuck bitches and get money.”
Die Spitz performs at Stubb’s on October 24.
This article appears in September 19 • 2025.