vibe report: a night w snow strippers, gen z's crystal castles

including full teen fashion breakdown. ur welcome!!

it’s a friday night in london, and the ny-based duo snow strippers are playing a sold out show to an audience of 2300 devotees.

the crowd is mostly teenagers, dressed in ripped tights and legwarmers, ironic american hunting camo, layered studded belts (a strict 2 belt minimum per person applies), and mini skirts (or in some cases, no skirts at all). one girl is wearing a pair of hot pants with dollar bills poking out of them, another has worn a sheer bodysuit over an equally sheer pair of tights.

goth boots and high top sneakers are very much in, and then there’s the endless amounts of fake fur, the many trapper hats (recalling a post-test icicles, pre-blood orange, lightspeed champion-era dev hynes), the bedazzled and studded caps, the fingerless gloves. even a pair of shutter shades a la kanye west circa 2007 make an appearance, as does an oversized millionaires-esque gold dollar sign chain.

snowstrippers

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your read on the aesthetic probably depends on your age. ‘snow strippers show looks like a jaded london casting (derogatory)’ reads one much-liked tiktok, about a previous tour date. ‘the last time i saw people dressed like this was at a crystal castles show in 2008,’ my friend (and +1 for the night) emma says to me. it’s an apt comparison, considering it’s the boy-producer, girl-singer double act that snow strippers is most often likened to.

the band is made up of tatiana schwaninger – lithe and long-haired, an ali michael lookalike prone to twirling on stage in tennis skirts that would make dov charney blush, and graham perez – neck tatted, as charismatic behind the decks as pacing about in front of them. they met on tinder in the scientology hotspot of clearwater, florida, before relocating to detroit, then nyc.

together, they make electronic music that shimmers and shudders, euphoric and melancholic at the same time. think ‘pretty rave girl’ meets salem’s ‘sears tower’, with a spiritual detour via the myspace scene queen synthpop of bands like the medic droid. not to mention a penchant for adding z’s to the end of song and album titles with an enthusiasm not seen since crunkcore (remember brokencyde??).

their song ‘under your spell’ is, of course, hugely popular on tiktok.

although they’ve been associated with the indie sleaze revival, snow strippers (who are both almost 30, so saw at least some of it the first time around) lean far heavier on the sleaze than the indie. imagine if you put myspace, the cobrasnake, harmony korine, and trance music in a blender and threw in a pack of american spirit and a sprinkle of ketamine. (“love prescription drugs”, a voice repeats throughout their set, along with a raver airhorn noise). the influence of korine’s 2012 floridian freak fest spring breakers feels apparent in their music videos, where bikinis and guns are recurring motifs. you get the sense that snow strippers would make whatever brat summer you’ve been having look more like a christian summer camp.

despite the thot daughter aesthetic, the crowd itself is relatively tame. a young girl, high only on the possibility presented by a room full of 2000 strangers, promises her friend £1 if she successfully obtains 10 people’s instagrams. a long-haired boy no older than 16 raises his eyebrows at me while making a vaping gesture. i shake my head no, and he turns back around with a shrug, leaving me to wonder if that’s what gen z considers flirting.

the carcasses of a line of jagerbombs litter the bar, but hardly anyone looks fucked up or even drunk, as teens with multiple facial piercings yet seemingly too young to buy booze sip water from liquid death cups. while the gigs i frequented at 15 came with the thrilling possibility of getting genuinely injured, sadly tonight there’s no mosh pit that would leave you close to being concussed.

still, the show itself absolutely bangs: it’s an assault on the senses that comes with a seizure warning, an alluring chaos which the duo are 100% in control of. mic in hand, schwaninger spins and dances, barely visible through the thick smoke machine fog, silhouetted against the blinding coloured strobes.

the crowd jumps to perez’s beats, iphones in hand, a sea of screens all recording the flashing lights. the noise is almost deafening. it’s disorienting but hypnotic, and impossible to look away from – like seeing the light before you die.