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Nov 14, 2025 By Andy Von Pip Photography by Polocho

Naming themselves after a Bauhaus classic might suggest coffin-chic aspirations, but London’s She’s In Parties trade graveyard nightmares for glimmering indie daydreams. There’s a hint of darkness, sure, but they’re hardly freshly exhumed vampire fashionistas. The band—Katie Dillon on vocals and guitar, Herbie Wiseman on guitar, Charlie Johnson on bass, and Matt Carman on drums—bring a decidedly more luminous energy to their music.

“It’s caused some confusion,” laughs lead singer and songwriter Katie Dillon. “We’ve had people turn up expecting a Bauhaus tribute band. We were like, ‘Oh, we’re so sorry.’ But they stayed for the shows and ended up enjoying them.”

Guitarist Herbie Wiseman adds, “Then there are people who don’t know Bauhaus at all. They’ll ask, ‘What’s the name of your band?’ I say, ‘She’s In Parties,’ and they’re like, ‘She’s in what? Cheese and Parties?

Bassist Charlie Johnson grins. “We’ve had people think it’s ‘She’s In Panties’ before now. That happens a lot.”

Dillon laughs. “We picked it because it’s a cool song and it just sounds good. Honestly, we couldn’t think of another name. We did have one, but another band had already taken it. There are a few bands named after songs, you know, like Radiohead from the Talking Heads track.”

Band names aside, Dillon has been writing songs from a young age. “I think the first one was when I was about eleven, and I think it was called ‘Shine’ or something stupid. It was on the piano. Then I thought, ‘Oh, I quite like doing this.’ When I was about seventeen, I got back into music properly and wrote a song called ‘The Internet Is Poison,’ which isn’t available anywhere.”

The band came together when Dillon decided to take music more seriously. She already knew Wiseman from school and later auditioned Johnson. “Well, I was the only bass player in college,” he laughs. “So it was slim pickings.”

Dillon picks up the thread of how the band found its footing. “We met Matt (Carman) who joined us then, just kind of got to know each other as the band when we started working together more ” That early dynamic has shifted slightly now that Dillon is based in London while the rest of the band remain in Essex, and they’re still working out what long-distance creativity looks like for them.

“It’s been hard,” Dillon admits. “I mean, I can still sit down on my own and write all the lyrics for this EP. But we are still trying to figure out how to be more productive and ‘together’ when writing. Charlie sometimes comes up to London, and I go back quite a bit to Essex to rehearse. So yeah, we’re still trying to get into our rhythm and find our groove. It’s not easy. But it’s good because the creativity does come from things like this, how we can do things differently. So we’re making it work.”

Johnson nods. “Yeah. Lockdown had a big effect on bands. It made us work differently.” Dillon recalls, “Our first song, ‘Mess,’ was recorded separately in our bedrooms. It’s doable, but it’s not as much fun as being in a room together.”

The band have previously released two EPs, End Scene and Puppet Show. For their latest EP, Are You Dreaming?, the band got together to shape the songs in a more collaborative fashion. Wiseman recalls the title track. “I was trying to lay down a guitar part, and Matt came in, the door creaked. I ended up playing the notes from the sound of the door creaking into the solo. We were all together, figuring out the song. The first part wasn’t going anywhere, so we had to put our heads down and work it out. I’m so glad we did. It’s my favourite on the EP.”

Dillon remembers the process as very last-minute but energising. “We realised we actually needed an EP, so we got together to finish the songs. It felt rushed, but being out of our comfort zone pushed our creativity. We could think differently and experiment with our sound. Plus,” she laughs, “we work well under pressure, we’re all good procrastinators.”

The EP showcases the band’s knack for audacious melodies, soaring guitar riffs, and vintage, anthemic synth blasts. On “Same Old Story”, for example, the dreamlike wall of sound reaches its peak, so intense it’s almost impossible to tell where the synth ends and the guitar begins.

“Ah, you can thank Macks, (producer Macks Faulkron) for that,” laughs Wiseman. “He just went mad with the Memory Man pedal. It basically creates noise, lots of layers, epic walls of sound. That crescendo at the beginning? That’s literally my guitar put through Macks’s pedalboard. The Memory Man is the delay part, and he was constantly twisting it, increasing and decreasing the decay and delay time, which created all these crazy ascending and descending sounds.

“Then he added fuzz with a Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, Fender Blender, pedal and when you put it together, it just makes some seriously weird sounds. I literally didn’t have to play notes properly. Macks was on the floor like a gremlin, twizzling knobs while I was playing completely in the wrong key, and he’d just go, ‘Yeah, that sounds sick, keep going, keep going!’ Some of the first mixes were mental. I did try and get a clean guitar mix on there. It was a bit overwhelming, but yeah, it was toned down in the final version.”

It’s probably not a sound the band could replicate live, but over recent years they’ve played alongside some big names at various festivals and gained support from BBC Introducing.

“The support we’ve had from people like Angelle Joseph at BBC Introducing has been amazing,” says Dillon. “Knowing that all these people were backing us made us think, ‘Oh, we could probably make this work.’ I think doing a session at BBC’s Maida Vale Studio was a huge moment for us.”

Johnson concurs. “Yeah, it’s one of those places where you walk into the room and think, ‘Wow, legends have played here.’ I don’t know about anyone else, but for me it felt like a real milestone.”

“And playing festivals like Tramlines in Sheffield, that was nuts,” says Wiseman. “At first nobody was there, and then five minutes later, everyone started coming in and going crazy. The crowd was so responsive, it was unreal.”

She’s In Parties have crafted a sound with broad appeal, though they are often lumped in with modern dreampop, nu-gaze, and synth-pop. The band aren’t that keen about being boxed into a single genre.

“Some of the comparisons don’t make much sense,” Johnson admits. “A lot just seem to reference having a female singer, which is fine. Others, like Tears For Fears, who we take huge inspiration from, make sense. Some of the comparisons are a bit hit and miss.”

Musically, their tastes could not be more varied. Dillon explains, “When we first started, I was all about Cocteau Twins and that kind of dreamier stuff. Over time, that has changed. I love bands like Wolf Alice and Paramore. Hayley Williams is incredible, and seeing frontwomen like that inspires me. Then you have Herbie, who is into metal and death metal, and he wants to bring in the guitars more. Matt is similar. There are so many genres we want to explore, we are still finding our sound, and that is the exciting part.”

The musical landscape has changed beyond recognition since the heady days of the aforementioned Tears For Fears, with most emerging bands now balancing regular jobs with rehearsals, writing and trying to navigate the often shark-infested waters of the music industry. “Well I have a lot of breakdowns,” laughs Dillon. “It’s not always easy, but I think I’m building up my resilience. I might be crying after work at 7pm, but it’s all worth it and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

The demands to provide content for the insatiable social-media beast have added a new kind of pressure for young artists, too. “Well, I wanted to be a musician, not a ‘content creator’,” says Dillon firmly. “I have to say our label (Submarine Cat Records ) is fantastic and very supportive, but you do hear stories. Stuff like if your social-media figures aren’t up you might get dropped, which seems really unfair. Artists do need time to develop.” Wiseman is equally unimpressed. “It’s crap for them. Like, if you haven’t got a million followers on TikTok, some people don’t want to know you. Some people just don’t seem to have an attention span these days.”

With three EPs released so far, She’s In Parties do appear to be getting the time to grow, with each release offering a snapshot of where they are and how far they have come as songwriters and musicians.

“We are still pretty young,” adds Johnson, “and each EP does kind of provide a window into who we were at the time. With this EP it definitely feels like we’re coming of age.” I’d say it’s my favourite so far’ adds Wiseman, “and the most musically ‘us’ of all the EPs we’ve released so far.”

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