When Josephine and Julianna Hopkins were teenagers, they owned a pet rat called George. George would sit on Josephine’s shoulder and travel in on the bus with the sisters from their home in the remote French countryside, before being smuggled into their oblivious school for the day. “I’d take the rat, which I wasn’t supposed to have - obviously, and throw it to Julianna on the bus: ‘You take George now!’” Josephine gleefully recalls. “I had the choice of abandoning it or looking after it all day in school, and I couldn’t abandon it so…” Julianna shrugs. Joint illegal rat custody might not form a traditional part of most siblings’ childhoods, but then most siblings don’t grow up to form a fiercely funny, society-skewering electro pop-rock band like Disgusting Sisters. The name was taken partly in homage to Succession’s Disgusting Brothers and their “awkward, weird, cringe” behaviours (“Those were the scenes we loved the most”), and also as a nod to the “bad sisters from Cinderella because we kind of feel like them on stage,” Josephine notes. But also, to reference ol’ Cinders herself, if the shoe fits… “We were very tortured teenagers,” Josephine continues. “We grew up in London until the ages of seven and nine but then our parents split up so we moved with our mum to the south of France and she would rent out our house to tourists every summer so we had to live in a campsite 100 metres away in a tent. We were stranded for three months a year so we’d get up to the worst stuff - dying our hair, listening to emo music, buying alcohol which was supposed to be for burning things but it was only two euros, picking up cigarette butts from the petanque [course]...” “We just always wanted to do what we weren’t allowed to do. We always wanted to take it a step further,” Julianna nods. “When we were really young, we’d secretly go and watch the films we knew we weren’t allowed to watch. It was rebellious but then it also helped develop our passion for horror. And even though we did have weird upbringings, it brought us closer because everything we did, we did together.” It’s a wildcard spirit and a bond built on creative interests that’s stayed with them ever since, and one that 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. Ever since they were small - long before the rat years - the pair would concoct elaborate performances for their parents, singing along to the pre-programmed karaoke classics on Julianna’s plastic keyboard. They’d always talked about making something together, but they’d never actually attempted it until then. Like with most things related to the sisters, it began as a laugh. “We wrote this silly, emo song about our mum’s dog wanting to break free, but the melodies were actually really good!” Julianna recalls. Over the same holiday period, they continued to write three more original tracks. Two of them - ‘Not Cool’ and ‘Baby K’ - now live in their live set; a show that, in less than two years, has seen them go from total novices to playing their first festival season with stop offs at Reading and Leeds, The Great Escape, Pitchfork Paris and more, as well as supporting Two Door Cinema Club in Ireland and now selling out their own debut London headline dates. It’s a wild trajectory for a band still in their infancy, but really, Disgusting Sisters have been concocting this world of sass and satire, horror, hilarity and the implicit bond of a thousand conversations about a thousand things for their entire lives. Josephine and Julianna are two halves of the same Disgusting coin and you can hear it in everything they write: a collection of earworm bangers whose lyrics read like sisterly in-jokes that they’ve decided to let the world in on. Take debut single ‘Killing It’ - a deadpan shimmy of prowling basslines and the occasional cowbell that takes on all the people in your life that try to offer up unwanted advice. “We wanted to take that expression of ‘I’m killing it’ but then push it further to bashing it on the floor, smothering it and destroying it because it’s my life and I can do what I want to,” Josephine says. Its follow-up, ‘TGIF’, looks at the weekend mentality of the miserable 9-to-5er and reimagines them - obviously - as a werewolf. “People drink so much they black out because they’re trying to numb out the whole frustration of the week, and then they wake up not remembering what they did. It’s like a werewolf blacking out after killing lots of people,” Josephine suggests. A darkly bouncing electro-pop hit, the track has already had a notable co-sign from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, who remixed it in customarily dancefloor-facing style. “We did some performances at Alexis’ DJ sets and when he offered to do a remix with Joe, we were so happy,” Julianna grins. Hot Chip are but one square in an eclectic patchwork of influences that fuel Disgusting Sisters. 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. “We want every song to be really catchy and an earworm,” Julianna nods. “We want it to be something we want to listen to on repeat. That’s really important.” Aided by bassist and producer James McManus, and buoyed live by Joey Robbins on drums and Jude Porter on guitar, their forthcoming tracks are exactly this: ridiculously infectious electro-pop-rock nuggets that tell the sort of weird and wild stories that Disgusting Sisters are slowly becoming known for. On ‘Sorry Mister’, the pair imagine “going on a night out and meeting all these different characters of men, imagining what life with those guys would be like and saying, ‘I don’t want to offend you but I prefer my sister’,” Josephine explains. The warped synth pulse of ‘Calvin Klein’ sets a classic tale of romantic decision-making alongside a metaphor about the half cocaine/ half ketamine drug cocktail. Josephine elaborates: “There’s two different kinds of guys in life - there’s either the guy who’s really nice but kind of boring, or the one who’s a complete arsehole with a huge ego but at least he’s fun. Every time you’re with one, you want to be with the other but Calvin Klein is the perfect mix of the two.” ‘Sugar’, meanwhile, might be their most hilarious offering yet: an ode to a much, much, much older lover who - despite being a bit of a misogynist with bad eyesight and repulsive toenails - has one redeeming feature (we’ll leave the punchline to them). Couple this with horror-infused visuals that come straight from the band (Josephine directed the ‘Killing It’ video), a thoroughly DIY sensibility that still regularly sees Julianna write songs on that years-old plastic keyboard, and a live show that combines matching outfits, ludicrous choreography and a determination to spread the fun from the stage out into the whole room, and Disgusting Sisters are already creating an intoxicating world to sign up to. “Before a show, we always tell each other it’s like we’re gonna be performing for our mum, forcing her to listen to the karaoke from the keyboard,” Julianna laughs. “We imagine it like that: like a childhood performance, but taken to a more serious level.” Serious about making something truly excellent but just as serious about fun, grab a hairbrush microphone, get involved, and get Disgusting.