Growing up, we all had that one friend who seemingly had no screen-time restrictions, let alone any regard for age ratings. With their parents’ film collection and a DVD player always within arm’s reach, their brains were just waiting to be thoroughly soaked in all the summer camp slashers, werewolf flicks, and whatever other monster-filled spectacles you could imagine.
Listening to the Disgusting Sisters’ debut album, Skin & Blisters, I found myself thinking a lot about that friend. What if there had been two of them? And what if they’d ended up making synth-heavy electronic pop music together? Well, as it turns out, it’d sound like a lot of fun.
Across the album’s 10 tracks, the Anglo-French musical duo and real-life sisters Julianna and Josephine Hopkins conjure up what sounds like the soundtrack to their very own weird, humorous, and anarchic horror movie. Filled with bloodcurdling screams and teenage angst, Skin & Blisters is a musical mishmash of influences ranging from electro to emo, with songs that evoke a sense of nostalgia while burrowing into listeners’ heads, lingering there for weeks to come.
The moment you hit play, the sisters give you little time to ease into the whirlwind of a world they’ve created. Instead, they unapologetically catapult you straight into the queue outside a club, standing on the threshold of a night out, a scene playfully brought to life on the infectious and wry opening track “Sorry Mister.” With poignant, theatrical lyrics laid over a relentless, forward-driving bassline, the sisters welcome you with a sing-along indie-pop track that takes aim at the unwanted attention women all too often face in public spaces. And rather than shying away from confrontation, the sisters, of course, have fun with it, playing on the contrast between politeness and raw truth.
This tendency to put their own twist on things seems to be a common thread not only throughout this very album but also in the duo’s identity as a whole. It starts with their very name, Disgusting Sisters, which comes straight from the “Disgusting Brothers,” the nickname of two characters from the TV series Succession. According to the duo, the name evoked a mix of cringe, irony, and weirdness that resonated with them so much that they decided to make it an integral part of their musical DNA. This turns their stage name into a hint: not necessarily about what genre their music might fall into, but rather about the fact that if you’re a weirdo, you’re probably gonna like it anyway.
And speaking of weirdos, it’s for this exact demographic that the two have yet another bassline-driven track on the album. “Weirdo Magnet” finds the sisters not only embracing their self-proclaimed identities as “weirdos” but also enticing us, the listeners, to surrender to our own peculiarities. And thanks to its dark, atmospheric synth textures, it’s quite frankly hard not to give in (or at least it was for me). With its hypnotic allure, the song draws us deeper into their dark yet playful world.
But just as you’re about to declare the sisters this year’s next big weird-electro duo (though that thought probably already crossed your mind during the very first track), they come along with “Killing It” and make it abundantly clear that they’re, well… absolutely killing it.
Just not necessarily in the way you might think. With their deadpan delivery, they take the phrase rather literally: choking it, kicking it, crushing it, suffocating it, beating it (should I go on?). Their flouncy, almost spoken-word vocal delivery turns the track into something of a warning to mansplainers and know-it-alls, backed by staccato bursts of thundering drums, electrifying guitar riffs, and, to my surprise, a cowbell?! It all comes together in a tune that lets you dance through rage, reminding you that you’re in control of your own life. Even if that means tearing it all down.
This destructive energy carries straight into the following track, “Baby K.” Here, however, the power dynamic shifts from taking control yourself to the control someone (or something) else can have over you, sending you into “self-destruct mode” instead. Playing with a double entendre, the sisters wink at an ill-advised “kamikaze” love affair while slipping in cheeky nods to everyone’s favourite horse tranquiliser. And while romanticising drug use or other forms of unhealthy dependency isn’t exactly something we should encourage, we might just let this one slide. All in the name of art, of course.
Throughout the rest of the album, the sisters prove time and time again that they don’t take shit from anyone. Especially not from men. And certainly not from ex-boyfriends. Take “Not Cool,” the song that actually marked the birth of Disgusting Sisters, in which they put an ex-boyfriend on blast, leaving the audience to decide what kind of guy he was. Or “Waste of Space,” in which they attempt to wipe someone from a metaphorical hard drive, all while making you feel as though you’re sitting inside a motherboard or some tech-heavy science-fiction movie.
Furthermore, the sisters demonstrate their understanding of the poetic dimensions of horror, no matter how lowbrow some of their inspirations might be. With “Frankenstein,” the album takes a moment to slow down. Melancholic and fragile, the song captures the bittersweet longing to piece together memories of someone dearly missed, as though they could somehow be brought back to life. An ode to their late father, the track takes on an almost haunting intimacy through the sisters’ softer vocal delivery, reminiscent of early Lily Allen. It reveals a more vulnerable side of the duo that stands in striking contrast to the album’s otherwise punchy, high-energy sound.
Following the dramatic arc of a classic film, the sisters make sure to go out with a bang, turning their attention to perhaps one of the greatest horrors of all: an endless, dull nine-to-five routine. With “TGIF,” they follow someone trapped in this everyday nightmare as they break out of their rut by quite literally unleashing their inner werewolf, a transformation wonderfully illustrated in the accompanying music video. While the track is filled with Halloween-esque screams and eerie sounds, it’s also built around elastic beats that bounce around the sisters’ almost spoken-word vocal delivery. Throw in lines like “Fuck off Phillip” and “I don’t care about the weather,” and you have lyrics I can already imagine a crowd enthusiastically shouting along to at one of the duo’s live shows.
Finishing off the album with their third pre-release single, the sisters bring everything to life one last time with an electrifying guitar and synth riff that repeats throughout the track. In my mind’s eye, the end credits are already rolling. Because that was fucking cinema.
For an album that clocks in at roughly 29 minutes, there’s quite a lot to unpack on Skin & Blisters. The Disgusting Sisters experiment with a whole range of sounds and ideas, and the album thrives on the contrasts that emerge from this experimentation. Drawing on established film and pop-cultural tropes, they put their own peculiar spin on each and every one of them, turning every song into a little chapter, a world of its own. This makes listening to the album feel a bit like channel surfing at 2 a.m., never quite knowing what you might stumble upon next.
And while I think much of the album’s excitement lies precisely in this unpredictability, it also makes me wonder what a follow-up might sound like if the duo allowed themselves to sometimes dive deeper into certain ideas rather than trying to showcase them all at once in such a condensed form.
Nevertheless, what I think lies beneath their deadpan and experimental storytelling is their ability to remind us that the monsters and monstrosities we face in everyday life, whether they come in the form of mansplainers, ex-boyfriends, grief, or even just a nine-to-five, aren’t necessarily things we need to be scared of, but rather things we can, and very much should, feel empowered to fight against. And have fun doing so.
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