"We're gonna try to open the pit at the Olivia Rodrigo show," Kate Halter grins. A month earlier, this would've been an insane thing to say. For one thing, Olivia Rodrigo shows don't have pits. Rodrigo plays arenas, and those arenas are full of seats — seats that are now going for four-figure prices on the secondary market. Nobody moshes at Olivia Rodrigo shows. For another, nobody could've guessed that Rodrigo would've booked Halter's rowdy Austin big-riff punk-metal crew Die Spitz as tourmates — not until it happened, anyway.
On a Sunday afternoon in May, Halter and her three bandmates sit in their curtained-off backstage green room at Salt Lake City's Kilby Block Party, just an hour or two after they play a sweaty and anarchic set on the festival's smallest stage. A couple of weekends before Kilby, Die Spitz were announced as openers on many of the European dates on Rodrigo's Unraveled Tour. In the months ahead, they'll play Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields festival, too. And they'll try to open the pit. They don't have any idea how that'll go.
The women in Die Spitz are all in their early twenties, about the same age as Olivia Rodrigo. Like Rodrigo, they're animated by the spirits of past generations of rockers. Like Rodrigo, they got serious about making music during the pandemic. That's about where the similarities end, though. Die Spitz's style is built on bongwater-stained riffage and raw, guttural vocals. It's a euphoric throwback to the days of Babes In Toyland and 7 Year Bitch. Die Spitz cut their teeth in Austin dive bars. Their first tour was with OFF!, the now-defunct supergroup of '80s hardcore legends. It's an unlikely pairing, to say the least.
Halter, reflecting on what's ahead of her, says, "They're gonna be such big shows. You can't see people's faces, really. So that makes us less nervous."
Her bandmate Ava Schrobilgen cuts in: "I mean, I'm nervous. I think that some of [Rodrigo's fans] are not gonna like us." Someone else chimes in that that's OK, and Schrobilgen quickly agrees, "She's definitely obviously pop, but I think she's got some edge to her! She's really cool!"
The members of Die Spitz all sound like they're processing this new career development in real time. None of them has ever been to an Olivia Rodrigo show before. They haven't met Rodrigo yet, but they did talk to her once. (Halter: "She said her dad's a big fan.") They know that these shows are a big deal, that they'll expose Die Spitz to entirely new audiences. Drummer Chloe de St. Aubin says, "We have a really predominately male audience right now, an older male audience. We're really excited to play for people who are more in our demographic."
Schrobilgen agrees: "We've never toured with anybody our age before."
The legends are true. Die Spitz became a band just so that they'd have an excuse to hang out with each other more often. Three of the four members had never even been in a band before forming Die Spitz. They were just buddies in Austin. Schrobilgen and singer/guitarist Eleanor Livingston have been friends since preschool, and they met Halter in middle school. Chloe de St. Aubin is the outlier, since she didn't really know them until relatively recently and wasn't a full member when they played their first show.
Back then, Eleanor Livingston played drums (and still sometimes does), but she wanted to get out front, so Die Spitz needed another drummer. It was January 2022, and the other three didn't really know how to be in a band yet. Their first gig was at the Hole In The Wall, an accurately named Austin institution that holds a few hundred people. Today, they all laugh that they "played so terribly" that night.
"We didn't know anything about how anything during a show works, so we brought three separate cars," Halter remembers "We brought a PA. We brought monitors. We brought our own microphones and mic stands."
"We didn't understand that they would have these things," says Livingston.
Schrobilgen cackles, "We were so full of ourselves!"
"I think it's just the 19-year-old mindset where you drink a bunch of alcohol and you're like, 'I'm gonna do whatever I want!,'" says Livingston.
"I only played a few songs of the set with them," de St. Aubin remembers. "They'd bring me onstage halfway through, and I was randomly in the crowd."
"We told her to open up the pit, mosh-instigate," Halter laughs.
De St. Aubin did her best. "I tried to instigate stuff, but at the time, I was really reclusive, so it was a very stressful task for me, to be like, 'Get into it, guys! But I'm also scared!'"
At the time, the other three didn't think that de St. Aubin really wanted to be in the band with them. "We had this really weird standoff where we were gonna ask her and we were all nervous," Halter says.
The "standoff," as Halter puts it, happened in Die Spitz's practice space, shortly after de St. Aubin watched the other three play a song. She can't remember which song it was, but it left an impression. "I was sitting in a beanbag really close to them, like underneath Ellie's bass," she says. "I was like, 'This is what I want to be doing. I'm really, really into this.' I fell in love. We were all out on the deck, and it was like asking out your crush, like when two people like each other but they don't wanna say it. We were all sitting in silence, smoking a cigarette, and I was like, 'I really wanna be in this band, like for real.'"
Backstage in Salt Lake City, all four members of Die Spitz are a little quieter than you might expect, but they really come alive when they're telling that story. They grin at each other. They giggle at each other's additions to the story. They talk over each other. You can see it radiate off them: They love being in this band.
When Die Spitz take the stage at Kilby, you can see that love in action before they even play a note. Kate Walter handstand-walks across the entire stage before she picks up her bass while Kesha's "Blow" blares over the speakers. After a few songs, Ava Schrobilgen jumps behind the drums, while Chloe de St. Aubin picks up a guitar and sings, the first of many instrument-switches. Eleanor Livingston holds a mic stand aloft and pumps her fist, her flaming red hair flying in all directions. The pit opens up. The members of Die Spitz never stop smiling. They might be having more fun than anyone in the crowd, and the people in the crowd are having a lot of fun.
As soon as they get off the stage, all four Die Spitz members jet over to the other side of the festival grounds to catch a furious Show Me The Body set. Later on, when I say that Die Spitz might be the heaviest band on the bill, Schrobilgen is quick to correct me, claiming that it's really SMTB. I get what she means, but Show Me The Body are weird-heavy. Die Spitz are heavy in the classic sense of the word — Sabbath-style riff-churn, gargle-roar vocals, lyrics about throwing yourself to the metaphorical or literal sword. They're a proudly horns-up old school beast of a band, and that makes them an anomaly at an indie-leaning fest like Kilby, just as it inevitably will when they join Olivia Rodrigo's tour.
There are subcultures where this kind of grit and grime thrives, but Die Spitz aren't really creatures of the doom metal or heavy psych undergrounds. Instead, they're a product of Austin's historically boundaryless music scene — a place where hardcore bands like Iron Age had their own takes on the warrior-metal spirit, where festivals like Levitation thrive, and where you can still see Frank Kozik posters from the '90s on venue walls. In their first year as a band, Die Spitz played high-profile sets at SXSW and Levitation. In their second year, they released their ultra-nasty EP Teeth and hit the road, first with OFF!, then with Amyl And The Sniffers. Things escalated quickly.
Early in 2025, Die Spitz signed with Jack White's Third Man label after label reps caught one of their SXSW sets. They're quick to point out that this was an unofficial SXSW set: "Fuck South By!" Livingston says, "I think about it to this day: If I hadn't played those shows, what would've happened? Because I was so ill. I had a crazy flu."
A few months after they signed, Die Spitz released Something To Consume, the raging and energizing full-length debut that they recorded with Turnstile/Title Fight producer Will Yip. During its release, the band came out with a series of larger-than-life, theatrical music videos, all filmed around Austin. In their "Throw Yourself To The Sword" clip, for instance, they take turns brandishing a literal sword while stalking through the aisles of a laundromat and a supermarket. "I used to go to that laundromat every week," says Halter. "Now, I found a better one."
Die Spitz have been working fast, hitting career benchmarks at record speed, and all of it still feels new. When I ask them how many festivals they've played before Kilby, they're not quite sure. Fewer than 10, probably. But they love festivals. At Kilby, they run around to catch as many sets as their day will allow. In order to talk to me, they have to miss Snail Mail, which is not ideal.
To hear them tell it, Die Spitz can't stand to be apart even when they're not touring. Schrobilgen says, "We'll be at home, and we'll spend maybe a week, probably less, hanging out with our partners or our other friends, just chilling. And then I seriously start to feel, like, ill! And so sad! And when I see them again, I'm like, 'Oh my god, I'm OK! We're all OK!'"
"We're also talking in a groupchat the whole time," Halter adds. "We go shopping together all the time."
"We decided that we're topped off for friends," says Schrobilgen. We don't need any more. We're not gonna try to make any more. I got all I need."
