Die Twice, The Rolling People

Press play on Die Twice and it becomes clear the four-piece are in a rush for nobody.

Olly Bayton (lead vocals and guitar), Billy Twamley (guitar), Finn ‘Blue’ Lloyd (bass) and Jake Coles (drums) formed in Exeter after a string of chance encounters. Olly and Blue had both relocated to the south-west for music college, leaving behind Coventry and Sheffield respectively, an experience they now dismiss as a “waste of time.” “We were doing our own thing, our teachers didn’t like any of it,” Olly reflects. If the curriculum failed to ignite anything, their shared musical instinct certainly did. A woodland meeting with local drummer Jake in the dying days of lockdown completed the early line-up, before former fan, Billy was drafted in on guitar, “There’s a picture of Billy on someone’s shoulders watching us at an early gig,” Olly smiles.

Die Twice’s sound is a tinderbox of their individual influences. Blue’s basslines draw from punk and hip-hop—The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and the High Focus label all in the mix. Paired with Jake’s love of The Police, Wunderhorse and Geese, they form a rhythm section that growls beneath the band’s soaring choruses on tracks like ‘Jakobo’ and ‘Jalapeno’. Billy’s obsession with Isaac Hayes and Stevie Wonder flickers between those grooves, chiming delicately one moment before twisting into spidery, monstrous riffs the next. Above it all sits Olly’s mesmeric, instrument-like vocal, with artists like Nina Simone, King Krule and Erykah Badu some of his biggest inspirations.

After becoming fixtures of the Exeter scene, selling out 500 capacity venues in 2024 entirely independently, the four-piece relocated to Brighton where they have lived and worked together since 2025. “I feel like I don’t know anyone else now,” Jake says, “I’m right below Billy’s room. Every time he picks up that guitar it’s always 3am.”

That closeness has only deepened their chemistry, both personally and on stage. Die Twice have embedded themselves in Brighton’s creative undercurrent, building a loyal following through their five consecutive nights sold out ‘Mosquito Nights’ residency.

Forged in the fires of their incredibly stirring live shows is where Die Twice’s new EP, Accept Me Like A Lie, takes shape. Across five tracks, it unfolds at a hypnotic pace— patient, deliberate, allowing atmosphere to bloom before erupting into full-band catharsis. Rather than pandering to fractured attention spans, Die Twice pull listeners into something immersive and slow-burning, threading together the cinematic sensuality of Serge Gainsborg’s, Histoire de Melody Nelson with echoes of The Bends- era Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Robert Plant.

The songs were shaped in real time, refined through performance and instinct. “It was really important to us that we could play these songs live,” Jake explains. The process began chaotically. “It was like we all threw up on a canvas,” Olly adds. That initial sprawl pulled from Latin, hip-hop, jazz and techno, though what remains most vividly is a lingering influence of 60s French cinema.

Olly became particularly drawn to the looseness of Éric Rohmer’s 1967 film La Collectionneuse. “It was the first time in a major film they were actually carrying cameras and moving around rather than being fixed in one place,” Billy says. Bayton’s lyrics echo that roaming lens, capturing fleeting details—textures, colours, tastes: the “orange walls and Escobar stain” of track, ‘Easy On The Blow’, or the “white room with ginger beer” on ‘Jalapeno’.

Bayton writes with a scavenger’s instinct, lifting fragments from books, films and overheard conversations. Lines inspired by Al Pacino films and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride slip into the EP—though he refuses to say where. He favours notebooks over phones, filling pages in laundromats and quiet corners. “You look through them like a camera roll,” he says. “The notes app is too busy with shopping lists. It’s like ‘oranges, tomatoes and a really profound lyric’.”

That philosophy feeds into the band’s wider ethos. “There’s something really human that people are missing out on”. The band prioritise feel over polish, “We like playing without a click track—you lose that chemistry when you focus on it too much.” That instinct runs throughout the EP. Opener ‘So Proud’ simmers with tension, its Spaghetti Western guitars hanging thick in the air, evoking the charged silence after an argument left unresolved. Bayton’s vocal builds from a whisper to a full-bodied howl as the band crashes into a distorted, spiralling climax.

Lead single ‘Jakobo’ opens with saloon piano before expanding into weightless verses and an explosive chorus, powered by the band’s near-telepathic interplay. Elsewhere, ‘Easy On The Blow’ drifts through a haunted groove, while closing track ‘Wishbone’ hints at what lies ahead—pizzicato strings threading through a fractured rhythm as Bayton’s vocal pushes into the red alongside Twamley’s guitar. “One day, we’ll play with an orchestra,” Olly grins.

Ambition hums beneath everything Die Twice do. Accept Me Like A Lie captures a band in motion—restless, exploratory, and quietly confident.