When the e-mail came in from their management last year telling them they were opening for the Foo Fighters, Die Spitz drummer Chloe de St. Aubin started screaming. She was seated next to her bandmate, guitarist Eleanor Livingston, trying to focus on homework for their online college courses, but the punk quartet they’d formed in high school just a few years earlier was occupying both their minds. Their absurdly high-energy live show and debut LP, Something To Consume, had won them a cult following, and they were both quite ready to take the next step.
“We were spiraling,” says de St. Aubin. “I was like, ‘We’re not doing anything. What are we going to do?’ And then I checked my phone.” They had secured that gig opening for the Foos at the 61,000-seat Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on June 27, 2026. It will be their biggest show ever, by quite an order of magnitude. “We eventually just started laughing,” says de St. Aubin. “And then we both forgot about what we were studying.”
The road to this moment of triumph — one of many they’ll have this year, since they’re also playing Coachella, Outside Lands, and Lollapalooza — began back in 2022, when Livingston, bassist Kate Halter, and guitarist Ava Schrobilgen were all attending the same high school in Austin, Texas. “We were super into rock bands, we smoked a bunch of weed, and liked to party,” says Livingston. “So we were like, ‘We should start a band.’”
In the original telling of this story, the epiphany came after watching the Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt on Netflix. But they’ve erased this from their official bio. “Redacted,” says Livingston, shuddering at the thought of being associated with a group she now sees as hopelessly sleazy and misogynistic. “We were 18 and, not gonna lie, on that wavelength of, ‘We’ll get a bunch of girls and drink a bunch of beer!’”
They rounded out their lineup by recruiting St. Aubin from a nearby high school and writing songs that were the antihesis of “Girls, Girls, Girls,” even if they took a lot of woodshedding to get right. “We would practice in my parents’ garage,” says Livingston. “And we were so bad. Oh my God, we were so bad. And it was awesome. We just kept playing because it was super fun.”
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They started booking gigs around Austin and developed a ritual where they’d swap instruments every few songs and take Iggy Pop-like stage dives into the audience. They recorded their debut EP, Revenge of Evangeline, in a single day in 2022, and the next year they found themselves opening for the Aussie punk crew Amyl and the Sniffers on a nationwide tour. “I think we aged ourselves seven years on that tour,” says Livingston. “I don’t know how we survived. We were doing 17-hour drives, unloading everything, selling our merch, playing the show, and still getting drunk all throughout that.”
Some nights all four of them crammed into one hotel room, and other nights they’d simply drive until they couldn’t make it any further, and then pull off into a rest stop. “We’d feel like we were going to die, because that’s where a lot of murders happen,” says Livingston. “But it was also the best time of my life.”
A big advantage of living in Austin was its easy access to South by Southwest. They got signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records in 2025 after playing a showcase gig at the yearly festival. “I had the flu and was so ill,” Livingston recalls. I wasn’t even singing for half the set. I was like, ‘Did I just die?’ And they were like, ‘Y’all were awesome!’”
Third Man teamed them with producer Will Yip, who helped them “trim the fat” off songs like “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay),” “Go Get Dressed,” and “American Porn.” The latter is a direct shot at sexist record industry insiders, and some older dudes who come to their shows just to leer at them. Some, they say, have even taken photos of their feet and posted them online. “It’s a very angry song,” says Livingston. “And I want the people that come to our shows just because we’re pretty women or they want to sexualize or objectify us to listen to that song and tell us if they’re still a fan.”
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Thankfully, the creepy foot-fetish guys are fewer in numbers these days. “It’s now a bunch of girls and gays and people that we want to appeal to,” says Livingston. “They’re saying, ‘I like hard music, but there’s not a lot of it made by women or people who are queer.’ I want to continue making our shows a safe space for them.”
The four members of the band now tour with a road manager and a technician, and a merch manager is about to join the troupe as well. Better bookings means they can often afford two hotel rooms. “We’re moving up,” says de St. Aubin. “We might even get our own beds.”
Until recently, many of them made ends meet with retail or service industry jobs between tours, and they took online courses while barreling down the highway in the van. De St. Aubin is continuing to study psychology and business, and Livingston is majoring in business and minoring in biology, but they left their day jobs to focus as much energy as possible on Die Spitz.
“I think I got fired,” says de St. Aubin. “They were like, ‘You’re never here. We can’t keep putting you on a schedule.’ I was like, ‘That’s fair.’”
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The Foo Fighters gig weighs on their minds (“I don’t know if people will show up early enough for us. I’m a little worried it might be scattered,” de St. Aubin says), but they don’t even care they’re listed on the very last line of the Coachella poster in tiny font. They’re still going to be there, playing the same day as Justin Bieber, facing an audience of thousands.
“The beauty of playing for so many people is an energy that not many people experience,” says Livingston, “especially when they know your lyrics and whatnot. It’s like you climbed to the top of a mountain. It’s freakin’ better than sex. It’s a crazy feeling.”
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