Any zeitgeist-tapping on their part is purely coincidental, though, with Simon and drummer Georgia Hardy writing most of the album's tracks before they ever even played live. Emerging from the ashes of the hyper-political Regressive Left, The Itch was a change in direction and outlook for the duo. "The Itch is a move away from writing music about current affairs and into a realm where we just don't want to talk about it anymore," says Simon with a laugh. "'Can't Afford This' from the album started off as a Regressive Left demo and has a foot in both of those camps, where it begins by talking about the cost of living crisis and ends with me saying 'I can dance, I can bury my head in the sand'. That's how it feels to me – everything's fucked, but instead of oversimplifying that in a song, we're looking the other way."

It's a shift that has been mirrored more widely, with the brief optimism that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour engendered among many young people flickering out, leaving a sense of powerlessness and a retreat into more immediate pleasures. When you're never going to be able to afford a house, and everything around you seems to get a little bit worse each time you look at it, politics can just seem too depressing to engage with. "Our generation and younger generations are just in a cycle of coping mechanisms," says Georgia. "Everything's fucked, and it doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon, so making the best of it means going out and having fun in the spaces we have left."

The value placed on gig and club spaces, both formal and informal, comes at the same time as those venues are closing en masse and bands are being funnelled into an increasingly professionalised template of what it means to be an artist. Gone are the days when artists could afford to muddle through their early days and hope that they'd build a fanbase through word of mouth alone. "We're perennially losing money," says Simon. "For our last London show, we really wanted to play St. Moritz in Soho, which has been around since the sixties and might not be around much longer. It's a sweaty, old-school venue which we knew would be a sick night, but it really wasn't economical to play there."

"When we booked it, we even had half of our team asking why we didn't play a standard circuit venue instead," adds Georgia. "You're constantly pushed towards venues that people in the music industry are comfortable with, and it just becomes a cookie-cutter trajectory, which isn't any fun at all. But musicians never earn any money anyway, and this is impossible as a career choice, so what's the point if it isn't fun? We could do the boring trajectory and still make no money, but we also wouldn't be able to make the personal connection with people that we get from playing these smaller, more unique venues."

Part of this wilful avoidance of doing the same as everyone else is a nostalgia for the not-too-distant past, when things were baggier, and there was no one single path to making it as a band. The Itch touch on this directly in 'Pirate Studios', a cowbell-heavy banger which sees Simon musing on London's hollowed-out nightlife and the state of the world more generally, culminating in the decision to set up their own party for lack of any existing alternative. Likewise, 'Aux Romanticiser' sticks the boot in on the increasingly self-serious and professionalised world of DJing, urging people to stop worrying about 'authenticity' and just grab the aux, "stick it in your phone and play some Beyoncé".  Even the iconoclastic 'No More Sprechgesang!' is shot through with more than a little fondness for idiosyncratic events like Café Oto's Krautrock Karaoke. These aren't misty-eyed memories of the distant past, either, something the band are keen to highlight when asked if it's even possible to turn back the clock.

"We can just about remember when things were really cool," says Simon. "I remember all these stories about Foals doing house parties, and we'd be at the Lock Tavern in Camden when that still did gigs. You'd get fifty people in there, and it'd be a sick show, but you can't do that anymore in London because there just isn't a venue small enough.

"I don't want this to become an exercise in nostalgia," he continues. "The messaging everywhere is about saving our venues, and I definitely want to see those venues still there, but a lot of them aren't doing anything different that's making me excited. I don't run a venue, and I don't know how you are supposed to survive, but a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot, are doing the same thing, and that doesn't excite us."

"I just always think: what would I want to do?" says Georgia. "As someone going out, I don't want to be doing the same thing at the same three places every night – I want variety. 'Aux Romanticiser' is a call for people to just have fun and do something, because it's not that deep. We've asked friends in bands to come and DJ, and they say they can't because they don't know how – you'll never learn how if you don't start off by romanticising that aux."

"It's the same with DJing and with live music," adds Simon. "If you don't start off playing in a shit band, you never learn how to be a good band, and you never learn how to entertain a crowd. If you jump straight into stadium rock, you're gonna have a real issue connecting with the audience, and those smaller venues are where you learn that stuff."

These are lessons which The Itch have very much learned the hard way, playing in a string of bands since they were teenagers and slowly working out how the music industry, and their instruments, function. None of those previous bands ever hit the big time, but they did leave both Georgia and Simon in a position where they have more confidence than most new bands to choose their own path. "I don't care about the bigger picture, I just want to work with people that are doing fun things," says Georgia. "But so much of the industry is just politics and people telling you that you have to work with X because otherwise you'll never get booked for Y, but if we're big enough, we'll get booked for stuff anyway! You've just got to be headstrong and actually believe in yourself."

It's an attitude that the band keep coming back to. It's one that extends to the album, too, with a straightforward honesty about their influences, meaning that 'It's The Hope That Kills You' is as musically eclectic as it is accomplished - it's not for nothing that their live band needs three additional members to even approach the sound of the record. Some of those influences are immediately obvious, and no prizes will be on offer for guessing that both Georgia and Simon really like LCD Soundsystem. Alongside New York dance punk, though, the pair draw from sounds as diverse as The Cure, Underscores and Bloc Party, all of whom come up during our chat. 

"I may be wrong about this, but it feels like it's only really the UK that's so obsessed with genre," says Simon, when asked about their grab-bag of inspirations. "When we play abroad, people don't seem to have any problem with what we do, but there's this inherently British need to catalogue everything: 'We're drawing up the world, and we demand to know where you fit into it'. We get people from electronic mags saying they can't cover us because we're a band, but the indie press seems to wish we played around with synths a bit less and had more guitar solos."

"What it all comes back to is that we don't want to be a carbon copy of anything else," says Georgia. "We love drawing on things that seem exciting and fun, but there's no point trying to recreate LCD Soundsystem in 2026. We're at a point where we're only interested in doing what we enjoy doing, so hopefully that keeps resonating with people the way it has been so far." ■

Taken from the May 2026 issue of Dork. The Itch's debut album 'It's The Hope That Kills You' is out now.

The Itch aren't the only ones realising that putting a donk on an indie tune is the secret to a heaving dancefloor. Bands like Adult DVD and My First Time are just as enamoured by 2am DJ sets as The Itch, and just as keen to smash through outdated genre divides that no music fans actually care about. But what's behind this sudden upsurge?

James Mellen, My First Time: It's definitely been a natural thing for us. We just didn't want to be boring or confined, and we were getting a bit jaded with guitar music, so we just thought, 'Fuck it, why not try a riff on a synth?' It just snowballed from there, really, and we kept adding clubbier and clubbier bits to our sound.

New York is a big influence, people like LCD Soundsystem, but also Fcukers and Frost Children. A scene isn't where you're from now; it's what you consume on the internet, so New York seeps into the UK in so many ways. Nightlife and club music is also having a huge boom post-Brat. People want to go to raves and gigs, but it just so happens that alongside that, gigs and club nights have been morphing into one a bit. The Dare's afterparties are just as popular as his live shows!

Harry Hanson, Adult DVD: There are six of us in the band, so there are so many different influences which feed into our sound. We started during lockdown, too, so we weren't thinking about playing live, and we didn't give ourselves any boundaries or limitations. We still do that now, so rehearsals can feel a bit like a covers band learning to do karaoke of our own songs.

I think this shift is happening now because things just come back around every 20 years or so. It definitely feels like everyone's on about LCD Soundsystem again, but all of Adult DVD came from guitar bands and just wanted to move beyond that and have some fun. We weren't intertwined with dance music when we started, but now it's pretty much all I listen to while we're recording or on tour. I just love digging around on Bandcamp and listening to weird Scottish acid house – it's pure enjoyment.

Simon Tyrie, The Itch: Not to be too bleak about it, but I'd speculate that everyone needs money and that DJing is a much better way of earning it than being in a band. When we first started DJing, we weren't very good, but we realised we could still make 300 quid a week from doing it.

There's also a freedom in DJing really good songs and remembering how much you like music. Nobody's looking at you; they're just enjoying the night. That's something that influenced our approach as a band, just realising that putting a four-to-the-floor kick and an offbeat hi-hat means that everyone has a good time. I don't know why everyone has had that realisation at the same time. It feels like there were a few years where the gap between bands and DJs widened, and now it's narrowing again.