A lot of songwriters might use their craft as a means to process life, but not many end up with a wild end result like Disgusting Sisters. A winning mix of horror, humour, musical influences that span from electro to emo and a wealth of joint experience, it speaks to a childhood of pet rats and pranks; world-building and wicked games. “We've both had very chaotic lives, so this first album is us trying to take all that chaos and give it a shape,” suggests Josephine Hopkins, as her sister Julianna nods: “It’s the outlet for all that.”

Enter the duo’s whirlwind debut ‘Skin & Blisters’: a record that comes good on all the tongue-in-cheek, slightly gruesome yet perpetually entertaining promise that their name - partly a homage to Succession’s Disgusting Brothers; partly a reference to the “ugly step sisters from Cinderella because we kind of feel like them on stage” - suggests.

Across 10 tracks, the pair aim their lasers at hopeless exes; productivity punishers and the sad drudge of the 9-5. Their delivery is riddled with deadpan absurdity, but at their core, Disgusting Sisters mean every word. “I hope people can relate to the songs because they’re all very honest and inspired by real moments.” says Josephine. “We're just being ourselves.”

It all starts to click into place when you understand the character-forming experiences they’ve had to draw from. “We were very tortured teenagers,” Josephine says. “We grew up in London until the ages of seven and nine, then we moved with our mum to the south of France. She would rent out our house to tourists every summer so we had to live in a campsite 100 meters away in a tent. We were left stranded for three months a year.” Julianna: “We were so bored that we’d get up to the worst stuff. We’d also watch a lot of horror movies because, thankfully, we had a portable DVD player to pass the time. It helped up develop our passion and it brought us closer because everything we did, we did together.”.

Their wildcard spirit and innate creativity came to peak fruition one fateful Christmas evening at the end of 2023 when Disgusting Sisters were born. In the interim years, both siblings had carved out separate careers in different countries and different areas of the arts. Julianna had moved to London to study music, spending years drumming in bands and working in events; Josephine lives in Paris and works as a screenwriter and director for horror films. They’d always talked about making something together, but they’d never actually attempted it until that night.

“We wrote a song inspired by our exes called ‘Not Cool’. It started out as a joke but then when we sang it we realized it was actually quite good”. Over the same holiday period, they continued to write more original tracks, including ‘Baby K’ - a song that winks with the double entendre of an ill-advised “kamikaze” love affair, delivered via cheeky nods to everyone’s favourite horse tranquiliser. While the majority of ‘Skin & Blisters’ is an impressively DIY project - written and recorded by the band with the help of producer and live bassist James McManus - these two early offerings were beefed up for the album with the help of producer Oli Bayston (Barry Can’t Swim, Rachel Chinouriri, Olivia Dean, Fatdog), giving a heavier nod to some of the pair’s more indie-centric influences, from Viagra Boys to Getdown Services.

Josephine and Julianna are two halves of the same Disgusting coin and you can hear it in everything they write: a collection of memorable bangers whose lyrics read like sisterly in-jokes that they’ve decided to let the world in on. Take new single ‘Weirdo Magnet’ - a prowling stalk of a track that fully embraces its inner freak. “It’s about embracing the weirdness in each and every one of us, because we've all got these faults and we can't erase them… So might as well celebrate them cos they’re what make us all unique”, says Julianna.

“On the infectious, wryly unapologetic ‘Sorry Mister’, the pair imagine going on a night out and meeting all these different characters of men, picturing what life with them might be like and thinking, ‘I don’t want to offend you, but I prefer my sister,’” Josephine explains. “As women, we’ve been raised to be very polite, cute, almost childlike, so we started wondering: what’s the politest possible way to reject someone? What interested us was that contrast between extreme politeness and brutal honesty.”

Throughout, the aim is “for every song to be really catchy and an earworm,” says Julianna. “We want it to be something we want to listen to on repeat. That’s really important.” Having gone through obsessive phases of loving everything from My Chemical Romance to Lily Allen, Pulp to Parisian alt-pop outfit The DØ, the throughline is a focus on hooks. One particular set of heroes, Hot Chip, even co-signed previous single TGIF with a remix: a sure sign that Disgusting Sisters are on the right path.

There have been plenty more of those moments too. Recently, the band completed their first sold-out UK headline tour, while in just over two years they’ve gone from total novices to playing Reading and Leeds, The Great Escape and Pitchfork Paris, as well as supporting Two Door Cinema Club in Ireland and Freak Slug in London. Having concocted a world of sass and satire, horror and hilarity, all centred around the implicit bond of a thousand conversations about a thousand things held across their entire lives, now they’re fully inviting their listeners in.

It comes to a touching head on ‘Frankenstein’ - a ballad written about the passing of their father when they were teenagers, told through the medium of stitched together memories. “We'd search for different details we remembered of our dad in people we'd meet. It was a weird way of creating a Frankenstein, trying to bring him back to life through these different relationships,” explains Josephine.

A heartfelt tribute that still sees the world through the siblings’ creative, unlikely lens, it cements the outlook of ‘Skin and Blisters’ and Disgusting Sisters as a whole: playful and brimming with character, but also completely true to themselves.