Who, or what, are Snapped Ankles? One of the more mysterious acts appearing at the 2026 Lōemis Festival, which is currently underway in Wellington, is a group of woodwose (wild men of the woods) adorned in ghillie suits who have become renowned for creating shamanic music experiences; a fusion of beats, synths, guitars and ancient forest rhythms with an electro post-punk edge. Ahead of their highly-anticipated show in Wellington next week, I had the opportunity to catch up with the enigmatic Ankle Austin to wax lyrical about the evolution of the ever-illusive Snapped Ankles, choosing the right attire, collective experiences of joy and the power of dance. Austin did not disappoint, appearing on the Zoom call clad in his mask with a wild head of hair, maintaining the aura of mystery that the band has become infamous for.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with an interview with you this morning Austin, and whether or not you would be in a ghillie suit.

Oh, I've got my mask on.

I'm relatively new to Snapped Ankles; someone introduced me to your music a few months ago. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about the band; suffice to say it's fascinating, particularly attempts to define what Snapped Ankles are. There are so many different takes on it. To go right back to the beginning, where did the whole idea for Snapped Ankles come from? How did that evolve?

I think first of all we spent a while playing with what a band could be conceptually, you know. With starting Snapped Ankles with a couple of people, first of all we had the name.

Where did the name come from?

Misery. Our friend Emily was watching Misery and said “I've got a great name for a band, Snapped Ankles!” I think also the fact it was kind of, you know, when you get a band name that's a kind of A&E injury or something like that, you know you're sort of, like, aiming pretty low there — you know, if people Google this, they've got to get through a whole load of horror first to find us. And I think that was part of our starting point was trying not to really be noticed, you know — we're just doing our thing and wanting to be a sort of outsider project. I think that was a big consideration when we started, which is quite a while ago now. The reason it was a while ago is because we were so underground that we didn't get signed for a long, long time. And then that's the start, I guess. Once you get signed, it's, like, “Oh, right, now we're playing the game”. The guy that I started the band with, Saul, who's left now, but he didn't like the kind of whole on-stage thing and the bands that we liked were the bands that were sort of anti-bands, like Throbbing Gristle or bands that turn their back on the audience or having a name that was to try and throw you off internet searches. And so the masks and everything came about really as part of facial recognition and these sort of things we were doing; we wanted people to get just into the music and not look at us — you know, avoid ego and all these things that l come from being on stage and in the world that we live in. So that was where that started off. We were playing and living in these warehouses where it was very much like an art performance, and if you turned up with a sort of straight-up rock band, it was boring. Everyone would walk off and smoke outside. So the nights that we were putting on in these warehouse spaces had dance pieces, performance artists and lots of different things. So with the band, it was, like, okay, if we want to do something, we are setting these up and also developing the project, because we didn't really want to play in Camden or in the usual rock venues. We wanted to just play at some parties. And then obviously the DJs will come on and do a good job, and we just want to have some fun before that bit. And, yeah, so that's how we started. The, sort of, forest costumes evolved from looking at the need for anonymity and looking at bands that had utility clothes, like functional clothes. It didn't necessarily need to be army-like, but like Throbbing Gristle and all the noise industrial bands would wear army surplus and functional clothes. And we found the ghillie suits online, and it was, like, whoa, they look like swamp monsters!

The idea was that like the trash is, we're the worst. What's the worst thing you could be? And it was, like, right, OK, that's always a good start for a band is at the worst, and it sort of was a mismatch between the name and the look. At the same time, we really wanted to do synth music, even though it was a rock band. But we didn't like synthesizers, or rather everything that comes with synthesizers, like the way that you stand holding a synthesizer, or synth-player hair. And a lot of the noise bands use synth and all that, but it's about finding ways. A fave band of ours, Lightning Bolt, they're just drums and a bass. And you think this is as far as they can go, and suddenly a new sound clicks in. It was a sub-beat kind of thing, bang on the kick, and he had this little box on his kick. And I was, like, “Oh, I've got a couple of those”. They're really cheap little synths that you stick on drums, and if they go through a big enough amp, they can sound really good. So I started getting these boxes and sticking them to pieces of wood, making a forest of them.

And you just hit the forest and it makes these giant techno sounds. It was like we were doing these experiments trying to make kind of, like, sequence, like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding music, but using getting the band to play clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, like bell ringers. And we'd do these performances where we'd get the audience in the middle and we'd surround the audience. There'd be four musicians going ding, and in a line going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And they can all make weird noises. It just ends up like bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. We were doing all this stuff, and the suits really just helped, because we'd have multiple people joining, and each performance might be someone jumping in, and the lineup went from four to three to four to three and moved around.

Eventually we went on tour with a friend of ours who is a performance artist called Daniel Oliver, and he did a tour of the UK. He's got dyspraxia, and so he did a performance where the audience don't really sit down; the stage and everything is the space. He takes you on an imagined journey; he introduces the piece and says, “We are here in this theatre, which is actually the scene of a murder a year ago in the woods”.

And he kind of does a hypnotism sort of thing for the audience, and they just have to imagine it's a year ago. And they re-enact this murder. And we were this little band in the corner that suddenly popped up; the forest band. We played along while he was talking and performing. So we really thought that we were on the right path with all this woody stuff. You know, trees are not going to go out of fashion in a hurry. So we lent into it, and we're still hitting along.

That is a fascinating evolution of a band. I have seen Snapped Ankles referred to as woodwose (a middle English term for a wild man) number of occasions. I think on the mood board for the band was traditional carnival masks. In Africa, in Mexico — it's all over the world. The pagan masks that they have, they all mean different things, but there's all this mask stuff. So I think once we had the masks, you start to see all the links between that. And I suppose as performers, there is the mask of even rock and roll, whether it's the gimmick or the grotesque; Iggy Pop was grotesque. Elvis was grotesque because of his hips. They were banned; you couldn't show Elvis' hips.

And that's the thing with the mask within the sort of music that we do, which is a long related to rock and roll and from punk, and then into more electronica and just any way to get people dancing. The mask is a quick conduit to being, you know, the idiot, the wild man, the thing, the other, that you're scared of. And then on the band side, it unifies the band really quickly. If we have a lineup change or something, everyone's in and becomes the squad.

One of the things that makes Snapped Ankles so intriguing and enjoyable is that the band and your performances are so multi-faceted and that there is an aura of mystery; the audience doesn’t quite know what is going to unfold next. A term that frequently attempts to describe Snapped Ankles is ‘feral’ and your ability to whip audiences into a frenetic state. There is a passage I once read in a book that stated when listening to music, it requires more energy to stop yourself from dancing than to actually dance, because it's instinctual that we want to move to the music. From what I have seen and read, it is very difficult indeed to remain still at a Snapped Ankles gig, which is in and of itself an experience of collective joy.

Yes. Well, that was the last album. It's, like, “Right, we need another album to keep funding the, kind of, touring thing.” And we ended up working around the quote from Alice Walker, that the hard times require furious dancing, which is like a collective dance. It's a call to cope with the world through communal dance. I think it is that. That was something in the last album we really looked at was the, sort of, communal aspect. And also how because everyone's connected via social media now, it's all quite linked.

There's no sort of separate — there's not loads of different scenes and tribes. It's kind of like, okay, there's this lot and this lot and this lot siloed off in our own little beliefs. And I think that collectively that's a kind of interesting thing. Because then, you know, you get the, kind of, communal outpourings over, say, Gaza or the communal outpourings over Black Lives Matter or diversity, you know, and these issues. That communality is sort of global to a point. It is fascinating.

We were looking at it from a point of view like protest, because protest is being banned. The act of protest is being banned in UK, even — all over the world. They're just kind of nipping away at the legal underpinnings of liberal society everywhere, really. And so it is an interesting time in terms of a society of forgetting, you know, all these laws have come in for good reason, because of 200, 300 years of, 500 years of abuse or war. And then, you know, they're going again. So we're at a moment where stuff is flipping back. This kind of, like, coming together, dance and hard dancing for our sake, because we're still dancing on the bones of the, sort of, teenage delinquent rock-and-roll vibe, you know, with our drumbeats and our guitar lines, and mashing it up with this, sort of, Teutonic of more electronica and synthesizer stuff. So it's a kind of different dance. But the sort of chaos and confusion that is fun chaos and confusion is the dance. That's the communal dance. And we want to do that. It's still the moshpit, you know. A moshpit's only good when everyone's in it. You know, it's not much fun when two people do it. Our job as the sort of songwriters of the malaise, you know — you have to use the malaise to actually help people cope, you know, and give a beat and a rhythm to a way to keep on going and keep your ethics as good as your aesthetics, as they say.

Have you had the opportunity to visit New Zealand before?

No, this is my first time. We are very, very excited. We've got friends and rellies, obviously, to catch up with. We are there for about a week; it's a bit of a flying visit.

And obviously, the war in the Middle East has made it all quite touch and go and all this sort of stuff, so as diehard ecologists, we are actually going to row a boat round to save on the carbon footprint. We'll be floating on a log over to New Zealand.

That might take a while; using the currents and navigating by the stars.

Yeah, but I don’t want to step out of character. But it's, you know, such a wonderful thing to go and dance and to listen to great music. And to have that collective joy and collective experience. To sort of go back to the primal, to the dancing. To lose your phone and your wallet on the floor. Lose a shoe. That's the brief — get the room going.

What are you looking forward to the most about coming to New Zealand?

Obviously, seeing a lot of old familiar faces. And probably some snow, and I’m definitely going to be exploring some of the native trees — you know, the obscure woods and arboreums.

Snapped Ankles perform at Meow on Tuesday 16th June as part of Wellington’s Lōemis Festival. Tickets available through undertheradar.co.nz