“Don’t let the name fool you, I can only describe Diet Lite as immense, and that’s an understatement. These cats are the dark matter of midwestern rock. It was the rowdiest music I’ve ever heard come out of a three-piece band.” -Aaron Pylinksi
Milwaukee’s Diet Lite wasn’t a power trio by choice, at least not at first. However, when circumstances required they become one, Max Niemann and Kelson Kuzdas, the band’s dual-threat guitarists, made the unconventional decision to split up bass and guitar duties equally. And not only in the studio, but on the stage as well.
This dynamic has become Diet Lite’s greatest asset: Evan Marsalli’s brutal drumming paired both guitarist’s ferocity on six and four strings, all giving way at any instant to an eccentric collage of old school punk, hooky power pop, psych freakouts, and good-old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. Add in the fact that all three members consistently pen songs for the group and you get quite the versatile outfit.
The trio commits to as visceral and physically exhausting a live performance as possible, seemingly doing everything they can to make a crowd boil. Midwest punk-poet Thax Douglas said it best in a recent portrait of the band: “..it’s almost like the goddess of destruction destroyed herself, but not completely…”
Double Wide Yukon, the band’s first collection of new material since 2023’s expansive Into The Pudding, captures this Jekyll-Hyde dynamic like never before. Written over a weeklong winter sojourn to the Wisconsin northwoods and recorded to analog tape at Jamdek in Chicago, with the goal of documenting an archetypal DL set (mid-set guitar-bass switch and all), nothing in their previous output has come this close to capturing the tenacity and reckless abandon Diet Lite brings to each performance.
