The English punks’ debut is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore.
Brighton’s Ditz make angry music in a world where there’s a lot to be mad about. Since forming in 2016, the quintet have armed themselves with pummeling drums and serrated guitar riffs against a world that persecutes queerness and normalizes harassment. “Shit jobs, stuck inside, no hope etc.,” the band explained in a recent interview. “People forget that it’s just quite fun to shout really loud.” Their full-length debut, The Great Regression, is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore that smelts and polishes that anger into engrossing melodic rock. Across 10 tracks, Ditz grapple with breakable bodies, the failures of a perception-based society, and the mindless trudge of worklife.
Inspired by everything from PC Music to At the Drive-In, Ditz aren’t afraid of plunging in headfirst and then working backwards to balance their chaotic experiments against pop structure. Opener “Clocks” demonstrates why it’s hard to fit this group into one category: Singer Cal Francis begins with combustive, chord-splitting screams that recall Converge, before switching character to eerie post-punk spoken word. The oscillation between his venomous roar and leaden spoken vocals resonates with the cultural mood: Anger over a raging dumpster fire of problems that cools to a complacent hopelessness.
But The Great Regression isn’t only unnerving because its whirlpool of distortive effects can feel like a tortuous auditory illusion, or because Francis’ vocal screeches sometimes reach poltergeist highs. On “Instinct,” he numbly recalls a habit of eating flowers and feeling the thorns scratch against his throat, not recognizing he swallowed them whole. Reaching a boiling point, he screeches, “I gnaw and I spit out my own flesh/Razor sharp pin pricks of want fill my head and coalesce.”
What makes The Great Regression such an relentlessly exciting listen is how Ditz balance an army of alien textures without compromising the dark irony of Francis’ performances. Some of the album’s most unsettling moments are the subtlest: “I’ll make you smile,” asserts the sinister entity at the center of “The Warden,” a metaphor for an obsession with work output that’s reminiscent of Interpol. “Summer of the Shark” critiques an insidious modern attention economy by comparing sensationalist news coverage of shark attacks in summer 2001 to the subsequent events of 9/11. “Now I know why Elvis shot TVs/Boredom is more evident when sensation is key,” goes one poignant line, flipping a pop-culture legend into an act of vigilante justice against a screen-obsessed society. The Great Regression has fun pointing out the world’s contradictions, subverting its vulgarity, questioning its systems. At its peaks, it feels like an antidote for the ennui of ceaseless catastrophe.
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