Track of the Week: Bela Spit are sick with excitement on ‘I’m So Hyper’
For a long time, there has been a big gaping hole in music where fun used to be. Remember when The B-52’s sang about matching towels and boys in bikinis? What about when Ari Up screamed so wildly on the Slits’ ‘Shoplifting’ that you can hear her say “I’ve pissed in my knickers”?
There’s something so liberating about art that refuses to take itself too seriously; it’s more human, more raw. Bela Spit, Leeds’ most exciting new punk quartet, possesses that hard-to-contain energy that has been missing from a lot of modern rock music.
Their music is so totally unbridled, with a roughness around the edges that feels reminiscent of the guitar bands that emerged from late ‘70s Britain, following in the footsteps of bands that previously emerged from the red-bricked student homes of Leeds, like Delta 5 or Mekons.
Bela Spit do something slightly different, though; their lyrics are more crude and laced in irony and humour, buoyed by the vocal elasticity of frontwoman Iris Casling, who can screech as well as she can speak (the word sing might be a little bit of a stretch).
On the band’s new single, ‘I’m So Hyper’, taken from their forthcoming album, sings/sobs, Bela Spit deliver a jaunty tale of vomit-inducing excitement, certainly standing apart from the ever-growing menagerie of Black Country, New Road and Wunderhorse wannabes who have come to increasingly dominate the UK scene.
Nothing sounds quite like Bela Spit right now, and the fact that each member plays an instrument separate from the ones they’ve studied allows them the freedom to completely give in to experimentation. The idiosyncratic guitars that largely form the band’s sound – slightly discordant and unpredictable – come from drummer Scarlett Baxter, while Beth Veasey, also a drummer, takes on bass duties. She might have only started playing the instrument a few weeks before the band played their debut gig in 2024, but you’d never be able to tell. In fact, she anchors everything down.
The steady drums that further keep ‘I’m So Hyper’ tethered down are performed by multi-instrumentalist Nika Ticciati, who you’re more likely to find playing piano, guitar or bass, but it’s double-bassist Casling who allows the song to break out of its relative stability, demanding us to look at her hips, to look at her lips, her waist, and while searching for affirmation, she seductively asks, “Aren’t they soft?”, “Aren’t they thick?”, “Aren’t they lovely?”, wanting us to know, but the problem is, she throws up if she gets too excited.
Bringing our attention to the corporeal, she reminds us of vomit in the same breath as plump lips, straddling the line between seductiveness and vulgarity, and by the end of the track, her voice has descended into completely unrestrained territory, turning into something that sounds like a mix of hiccups and flinching at the touch of a hot pan.
While their previous single ‘Sports Nappy’ was a great, albeit nonsensical, earworm (“Fill it up, do sport”), ‘I’m So Hyper’ shows slight instrumental refinement with its bending guitars and thick bassline – even if Casling paints a rather visceral picture in our minds.
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