Gut Health: “We want people to dance, feel free – and a sense of rage”
I overuse the word kinesis,” Gut Health guitarist and synth player Dom Willmott says. “I’m constantly thinking about it: How are you creating energy and then releasing it?”
It’s hard to think of a better question for this band. The Australian sextet’s whirring, feverish dance-punk is utterly physical in nature – and have been driven by thrilling forward momentum since they formed just under three years ago.
Half of the band – Willmott, singer Athina Uh oh, and bassist Adam Markmann – are speaking to NME over a video call from a French hotel room. That night, they’ll finish their second European tour of 2024 with a show at Paris club Supersonic alongside fellow Melbourne DIY garage-rockers the Judges. The two-week run has included, among other things, a festival organised by leftist German football club St. Pauli at their home stadium in Hamburg.
“It’s been really special,” Uh oh says. “Touring this year has been our first time overseas and we didn’t think we’d be able to do it.”
It’s been a particularly active six months for Gut Health: In February, the band joined Queens of the Stone Age on an Australian tour alongside Perth psych-rock eccentrics Pond. For a band who cut their teeth playing packed-in, sweat-drenched dancefloors at local pubs, it was a trial by fire – one they thoroughly relished.
“It was our first time playing in venues that size,” Uh oh says. “It was a really good way to just launch ourselves.”
In October, Gut Health’s ascent will reach a new height with the release of their debut album, ‘Stiletto’: a tense but ecstatic marriage of blistering noise heaving wildly over supremely danceable bones.
“We can do anything we want. That’s the genre that we’ve attached ourselves to” – Dom Willmott
The foundations of this hectic, frenzied heater of a record and the band that made it were laid in stasis: Uh oh and Markmann started writing together while stuck in one of Melbourne’s many pandemic lockdowns in late 2021.
They were soon joined by Willmott, guitarist Eloise Murphy-Hill, drummer Myka Wallace and percussionist and synth player Angus Fletcher: a mixed bag of musicians whose repertoire spanned noise to folk, punk to jazz to soul, melding together with zippy, unencumbered promise.
“We got a lot of great musicians to start playing with us, and I think it was because all their other projects had stopped,” Markmann says. “We were really lucky, being able to jump on everyone’s hunger.”
They started rehearsing out of a storage unit in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, capturing the energy of the “ADHD, genre-bouncing” music they were trying to make. It was there they recorded 2022 debut EP ‘Electric Chrome Party Girl’, which teased the jittery, frenetic sound they flex on ‘Stiletto’.
Gut Health’s emergence comes as part of a particularly fruitful moment for post-punk in Australia, which is home to some of the most exciting, inventive bands turning rock’s conventions on their head.
Since forming, they’ve played shows with established flag-bearers of the community there like RVG and Body Type, along with emerging acts like Screensaver and Loose Fit.
All are bands that seem to embody post-punk as Willmott sees it – “less of a reference to genre and more to a place in time … when everyone was trying to tear everything down and redefine it.
“The meaning of what we’re doing is that we can do anything we want. That’s the genre that we’ve attached ourselves to.”
At their best, Gut Health coalesce the groove of ESG, the rawness of Kleenex/LiLiPUT and the thrilling weirdness of Pere Ubu. But the sound is all theirs too, brimming with life and volatility.
On ‘Stiletto’, Markmann’s spindly basslines lock into Wallace’s muscular but loose drumming – creating a robust skeleton for Murphy-Hill and Willmott’s guitars to clash above while aggro electronics sputter like junked machines on the fritz.
“It always starts with bass and drums,” Markmann says. “Then everyone else does crazy shit on top of shit.”
There’s an egalitarianism to it, ego sacrificed in favour of collective energy, each part feeding off the other. “It’s not just all about what the guitar melody is doing,” Uh oh says.
“That’s the goal: for people to dance liberally and feel free” – Athina Uh oh
Her vocals, exuberant and theatrical, cut through the chaos and turbulence beneath. On the album’s epic, nearly eight-minute title track, they punctuate a hypnotic, snaking bassline and drums, each syllable jagged and dramatic, before the song ramps up in intensity, a noise bricolage of synths and guitars washing over.
The final few minutes collapse into glorious discordance, complete with saxophone by friend of the band Yang Chen. It sounds absolutely fucked, like it’s exorcising all the tension and violence it possibly can before tapping out with an exhausted, droning synth.
That build and release is central to a concept Uh oh describes as the “healing qualities of consensual rage”: tapping into anger in a way that’s collective, generative and nourishing.
“Being able to let loose and feel this sense of catharsis … that’s healing, that can be healthy. It’s OK to access that rage and violence if it’s done in a way that’s conducive to something positive,” she explains.
“We just want people to dance, feel free and also feel a sense of rage. That always comes back as part of the intention.”
It’s not always appreciated how much the dancefloors of the most violent hardcore shows and most euphoric raves have in common. Gut Health channel the spirits of both.
“You think about the function of live music as an emotional release for people. There are other emotions than bliss or ecstasy that maybe people want to feel in those experiences,” Willmott says. Anger, after all, is an energy.
“We’ve had a couple gigs [on this European tour] where they’ve been quite small rooms, DIY spaces,” Uh oh reflects. “Feeling that energy in the room with everyone dancing, you can’t really beat it. That’s the goal: for people to dance liberally and feel free.”
It’s appropriate that a band so conscious of the flow of energy in their live performances are thinking hard about their current momentum – and how to make it last.
“At the start, we thought, ‘the best kind of rehearsal is playing live,’” Uh oh says. “We just wanted to move around because of lockdown, so we gigged quite relentlessly.”
Now, Gut Health are “starting to think of longevity,” according to Willmott. “Preserving energy and passion and not wasting that, trying to steer to what’s important.
“It’s always felt like you have to acknowledge and respect the opportunity that exists here, having six people who have all been very locked in and aligned in the same way. You don’t want to waste that.”
Uh oh says they’ve needed to be more deliberate in their steps. “We definitely turn down a lot of stuff and try to think about people’s mental space and what’s worth it,” she says.
“It’s tricky, because you’re still starting out and trying to… not burn yourself out. We’re a six-person band, but I think we’re all really good at communicating with each other about this. We’re as much like family as bandmates.”
Moments later, Markmann looks at his phone. Their hotel checkout is in precisely one minute. Time for Gut Health to get moving.
Gut Health’s album ‘Stiletto’ is out October 11 via Highly Contagious/AWAL
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Ali Gallagher
NME
