Bathing Suits | Doom Club
The Lexington, London
25th February 2026
Pulsating electronic beats? Check. Atonal, jarring riffs? Check. Surfing the crowd in your knickers? Check. All in a day’s work for Bathing Suits. Steve Morgan wades into the mosh.
On a night for new sounds, a hungry, expectant, youthful Lexington crowd are attentive for the arrival of the excellently named Doom Club, whose sly, loose gutter funk gets the evening off to an impressive start. Arousing plenty of curiosity on the London circuit these past 18 months, the M25 corridor three-piece’s Beefheart-esque eight-hour rehearsal sessions are paying a handsome dividend. Opening number Worldwide On It is a joyously jaunty beatbox-driven affair, where shared rap-cum-playground-chant vocals recall Paul’s Boutique era Beastie Boys, dotted with flecks of Beck’s early slacker efforts. Underneath the quirkily knockabout, playful charm, there’s some real talent here. Sounds pop in and out of the mix, underpinned by squally feedback grooves and satisfyingly dubby bass. No Sense Make Sense calls to mind the much-missed Campag Velocet, PIL and The Slits.
The first rule of Doom Club seems to be that if you can hit it or strum it, then have a go. Instruments are regularly swapped – all three take turns on the bass. And they’re pleasing on the eye. Puppyish frontman Liam Duane has a haircut that could help him pass for ’70s poster boy David Cassidy at a distance; Katie Lee is a quiet delight, switching from synth to bass, where she bops absentmindedly, and Leo Cicero proves himself adept on either drums or bass, and also chimes in on vocals.
With its initial cacophony of dissonant yelps, the bonkers, grungy rave of the disarmingly charming Ru Paul sees Lee take vocal lead – “I could be all that you want if you give me a chance” – she pleads passionately amid a throbbing storm of bass and shredded wah-wah guitar that shouldn’t make sense, but somehow does. A switch to real drums next for The Prayer, a dirty, swampy blues garage stomp, where Duane affects a southern preacher’s drawl across a rollicking experimental backdrop. The drums – a recent addition – offer a wider landscape for a band still finding their way in some respects, but passing many interesting places on the way. It’s a fun watch. Just as arch magpies Happy Mondays snatched other people’s silver, Doom Club are equally hip to that playfulness. There’s a grab of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in the riotous throw-it-all-on-the-canvas splash of Absolute Martian, lyrical steals from Bowie and Talking Heads in the aforementioned Ru Paul. As things come to a sweaty head with the short manic instrumental thrash Manhunter, an encouragingly warm reception suggests Doom Club’s fortunes are very much on the up.
On Louder Than War’s radar as early as January last year and reviewed here, Leeds four-piece Bathing Suits have whipped up a splash on the socials with their vortex of sweaty industrial punk sturm und drang. Like the lost soundtrack of an Italian giallo splasher – think Suspiria re-enactment – visually, they’re something else – like a test-tube tryst of Throbbing Gristle and the Addams Family. Sporting a bra and pants – at least initially, she sheds the bra two songs in, twirling it triumphantly around – Freyja Blevins serves the meat in their big-beat manifesto, operating the drum box, engineering the BPM and generally dicking around with your heart rate.
A non-stop, willowy blur, blonde hair lashing her face, she certainly gets her 10,000 steps a day. At one point, she sails out across the sold-out Lexington’s sea of hands, disappearing briefly before re-emerging with a grin. It’s hard to imagine her having a day job to give up – you don’t get many of these to the pound. Over the relentless maelstrom of industrial beats, guitarists George Dickinson and Andrew Mulholland wreak the oddest noises from their instruments, their skeletal fretboard gymnastics fleshed out by the thrusting thuds of bassist Elise Hughes, who throws some impressive shapes herself. Mulholland is the spit of sad-eyed 60s actor Peter Lorre, only with a moustache. His diminutive frame, thrashing away, makes a jarring sight to Blevins’ left, another ‘other’ aspect of a show that feels as much performance art as gig.
With just a handful of recorded material so far, it’s all done in a frenetic, jagged, breathless 35 minutes, after which you feel like you’ve had your cheeks firmly slapped. Last year’s single I Can Be A Freak, with its nightmarish spiral into a sluggish swamp of high and low frequencies, is eagerly lapped up. New release Empathy is a swelling, screeching seven-minute, take-it-up, take-it-down assault of the senses which neatly encapsulates the band’s soundscape, pitched somewhere between Sheep On Drugs, Killing Joke and Ministry. There is no encore, because there is nothing left to say. There are, however, plenty of blown out cheeks and raised eyebrows. The novelty will be examined with more scrutiny as time passes, but for now, Bathing Suits are turning heads Exorcist-style and, what’s more, appear to be having enormous fun cresting the wave. Surf’s up.
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Follow Bathing Suits on Instagram and Bandcamp
Follow Doom Club on Instagram and Bandcamp
Words by Steve Morgan. You can find Steve on BlueSky and Instagram
Photographs by Robyn Skinner
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