ALBUM REVIEW: Disgusting Sisters – ‘Skin & Blisters’

If you know of Disgusting Sisters, it’s likely from their track Sorry Mister, an attempt at engineering a viral hit in the vein of that “sexy gyals TikToking their bunda” song. Unsurprisingly, it’s dire. It’s the worst kind of modern British music, haplessly trendy and conflating ketty-rah obnoxiousness with a relatability that anyone wants to acknowledge. Think if Charli XCX had never transcended being an art-school posho, or a particularly nauseating breed of UK social media ‘personality’.

Worse still, there’s no need for Disgusting Sisters to taint a first impression of them like that. They’re a lot of fun live with genuine simpatico presence, no doubt helped by the fact that they’re actual sisters. Furthermore, Skin & Blisters as a whole has promise as it cuts between indie and alt- / electro-pop assuredly. But for as much as Sorry Mister is a lodestone tied to the head of this debut, it’s also representative of its broader issues. It’s not hard to picture Disgusting Sisters doing reasonably well, but is this really the best way to go about it?

Funnily enough, that’s not strictly in reference to content. Yes, you’ll feel your eyes roll at how every single character in these songs is like an archetype from an E4 drama, but with music like this, you just have to deal with it. For as much as Sorry Mister sucks, it would’ve been no better or worse in anyone else’s hands. Better outcomes emerge from Not Cool or Killing It, still under familiar terms—respectively, a loser ex-boyfriend and a slightly deluded girlfailure—but filling up on snappy details can neutralise those judgements. Plus, as a standard, Skin & Blisters is a catchy-enough listen. Disgusting Sisters seem to have realised the earworm potential of what they do, and songs like Baby K and Fence Sitter are empowered by that.

The deeper issue is how a lack of focus this ingrained helps none of that whatsoever. Skin & Blisters, as a young, messy debut parading around its youth and messiness, could’ve gotten away with being rough around the edges; a lot of them do. What Disgusting Sisters have done, though, is carved up their potential, divvied it out, and forgotten the connective tissue between any of it. Thus, most of the album alternates—literally; it switches back and forth, song to song—between jumpy Gen Z indie-rock and minimalist, bassy electro-pop, rarely meeting or complementing each other. The closest they get is Calvin Klein’s rubbery club beat sawn open by a buzzing guitar, though being the very last song presents it as either an afterthought, or something happened upon a fair way into creation.

As a result, Skin & Blisters is piecemeal and disjointed to little effect. It’s not even a case of a wide gamut of strengths when the pop songs are almost always the most effective. Weirdo Magnet is a wholesale ripoff of Billie Eilish’s bad guy, but it’s got a good feel for its kooky, loose-screwed vibe. Later, Waste Of Space and TGIF are propulsive and razor-sharp thanks to how much play their basslines get. Compare those to the impassive TikTok-indie of Sorry Mister or Not Cool (or the inexplicably floaty ballad Frankenstein) and it’s not even close where Disgusting Sisters’ best lies.

That sequencing only drives the wedge in further, too. You begin to realise how this production style favours sharper minimalism, as opposed to indie-pop that can only move via ricocheting inside its heavily gated production. The singing might take an even greater hit. There’s already a smaller, conversational style to how Josephine and Julianna Hopkins perform, which gets further shrunk down and exenterated when having to compete with Baby K and Fence Sitter. Conversely, dipping down into a whisper on Weirdo Magnet or strutting nonchalantly across Killing It are so much more natural.

It all circles back to Sorry Mister as the album’s opening salvo—a bad song in an ill-fitting style—and how that encapsulates where Skin & Blisters goes so regularly wrong. Disgusting Sisters are not without talent or appeal, but they’ve got nothing close to a firm hold on them. This is meant to be the body of work that defines them, and yet, by the end of it, any ideas of what that could be are more conflicting than anything. Are they socials-savvy indie hypesters? Are they electro-pop cool kids? Do they even know, given their readiness to cycle between them? And with how uneven it all feels, on every front, how satisfied can you really be with something like this?

For fans of: Lynks, Jessica Winter, Wet Leg

‘Skin & Blisters’ by Disgusting Sisters is released on 30th October on Source Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall