Never Exhale

Review of Never Exhale by DITZ

DITZ, the Brighton quintet that does everything to give you a dystopian, paranoid experience, surprise me on Never Exhale but don’t fully convince me. Yet.

They open with “V70”, the run-up to “Taxi Man”, and it shows what DITZ are best at: building a dystopian, off-putting, grimy atmosphere before a single lyric starts. It straps you in for a ride that, at this point, feels immersive.

 “We wrote it across a couple of days in Cologne, in a disused air raid bunker. We properly fell out while we were writing it. There was nothing coming for so long until we stumbled into Taxi Man. The whole song came together pretty quickly and is now collectively our favourite track to play live. It’s one of those moments you hope to recreate again sometime but can’t really imagine the scenario.”

“Taxi Man” is comfortably the best thing DITZ have made so far. The riff is repetitive and filthy that feels grey, layered over it are air raid sirens. Fitting, given they wrote the thing in a disused air raid bunker in Cologne, about the greyest place imaginable. It’s the one dystopian DITZ track that survives repeat listens, which is not something every song on here manages. It also feels like one of the few tracks on Never Exhale that wasn’t rushed. That’s the shame of it: if the rest of the album matched it in both feeling and sound, I’d have been a lot more impressed.

“I feel like Space/Smile is pretty unique within the album. It’s the shortest track by a fair margin. We’ve kind of become known for using dynamic shifts to create drama in our music and with this track we tried to avoid it. It’s all about the escalation.” – Vocalist C.A. Francis

“Space/Smile” is far more aggressive and drum-led, turning that discomfort into something closer to pure rage. At under two minutes it never lets up, it just gains speed and weight. Its strength is the instrumental heft, but the vocal is where it loses me. Francis doesn’t match what the rest of the band are throwing out, and the off-beat delivery in places fel more like a mistake than a choice.

I’m forever stepping on snails in the rain
Whether I twitch at their crunch or their pain

To be honest, when “Senor Siniestro” opened with that drum pattern I thought I’d put on “There, There” by accident. The illusion doesn’t last: Francis comes in, less fragile than Yorke but no less mournful, and you know exactly where you are.

It’s one of the more thematically coherent and finished-sounding tracks here. There’s more thought and time in it, and the band lean back into the loud-quiet dynamic they’d deliberately avoided a track earlier. The instrumentals feel properly layered, with riffs that drag you through the dirt.

“Do you think Divine would have advertised for H&M? Do you think Alan Turing would have been high up in some Silicon Valley tech company? Do you think James Baldwin would have written for Pink News? I doubt it. I think we should claim some dignity back. Then again, maybe I’m a cynic. Maybe it’s a sign of acceptance that queer people can be the villain rather than just some oppressed class. It just doesn’t sound like the kind of acceptance that I think is acceptable.”

Another one that feels finished. “Four” is my second favourite track here, and unlike most of the album it was written properly rather than hammered into shape between soundchecks. It’s also the most politically loaded thing on the record, which makes sense given Francis is writing from inside the community being sold off. The old advice about only writing what you actually care about holds up here, and you can hear it even if, like me, you’ve never experienced something similar.

“Never Exhale was very rushed in how it was recorded and I think in our case it suffered as a result.”
Jack Looker, Under the Radar, January 2025

“God on a Speed Dial” is where it goes wrong for me. It sounds rushed. That alarm-like riff is mixed far too high and, put plainly, it’s annoying. There’s no real rhythm to hold onto and no structure worth the name, and repeating the same line over and over doesn’t rescue it.

“Smells Like Something Died in Here” feels like another afterthought. It doesn’t pull me back into the dystopia they conjured on “Taxi Man”, and it doesn’t give me anything to chew on the way “Senor Siniestro” or “Four” does. It just feels like the potential of DITZ died in there.

“18 Wheeler” sounds like a tired jam session someone decided to record. Which is a shame, because this three-track run drags the whole middle of the record down, and by the time the last two arrive, whatever appetite you had for the finale has gone.

Have you ever stumbled on to something you have
But don’t need? (Throw it away)
Throw it away
Have you ever come across the great remains
Of what it’s been? (Throw it away)
Throw it away

“The Body as a Structure” finally shows a bit of what DITZ can do. There’s a proper build to it, all plucked, spidery guitar lines I haven’t heard anywhere else on the record. It sounds like The Cure starting out in the 2020s. That loud-quiet-loud dynamic works perfectly here, dropping away and then coming back heavier.

My problem with it has nothing to do with the track. It took four listens on its own, away from the album, before I started enjoying it, and that’s because by the time it arrives I’m worn out by the three that came before. Which is a shame, because it drags the whole record down with it.

“I wrote that in my mum and dad’s living room.”
Jack Looker on “britney”

“britney” is the other track that wasn’t written in a hurry, and it’s the biggest set piece here. It sits well at the end, the grander sound earning its place as a closer. It’s also the track that best explains my opening position, because it shows what DITZ can do when they’re building something larger than a two-minute punk song. The complexity is there. It just needs time they didn’t have.

I did enjoy Never Exhale, but you have to dig for it. “Taxi Man” and “Senor Siniestro” are the rough diamonds here, and getting to them means shifting a fair bit of rubble like “18 Wheeler” on the way. It’s been eighteen months now, and I hope DITZ take their time on the next one: more thought, more complexity, more DITZ.

Featured Tracks

Taxi Man

Four

Space/Smile