Dick Move Are an Ambitious Punk Band. That’s a Good Thing

Every dive bar holds the ashes of forgotten bands, gang aft agley. 

A group of dreamers, at first unsure of themselves but gaining more and more Dutch courage, concoct a plan: “I’ve always fancied myself as a singer”; “man, have you listened to that new Wednesday record? We could sound like that!”; “we can practice in my sharehouse’s garage”; “I guess I could try to play bass”; “are we doing this?”

They’re doing this. Or maybe not. Most of the best-laid bands, formed in rushed conversations from Melbourne to Paris to midwest college towns, won’t go the distance, save for a hasty EP or a handful of house shows. 

What fuels the bands that do make it, though? In Dick Move’s case, it helped that their initial late-night conversations were largely about the issues they wanted to make music about. 

“That was always what we said — the things that we were writing about right at the start were the things that we could talk about at 2am, sitting around the bar, talking about the stuff that was pissing us off, [that was] happening in politics,” Lucy Suttor says. “Yeah, the late-night chat turned into punk songs, which I think would be the origin of a lot of punk bands.” 

Dick Move’s force-of-nature frontwoman is recalling the band’s origins over Zoom, speaking from a calm oasis abutting Tāmaki Makaurau’s heaving Karanagape Road, conveniently close to where all five current members — Suttor alongside Lucy Macrae, Hariet Ellis, Justin Rendell, and Luke Boyes — first met. 

“We bonded over [Karangahape Road venue] Whammy Bar because that’s where we all were at the time. So the band started because Lou wanted to learn to play bass. She had been in the music industry and working with music for a really long time and just wanted to get into it so she learnt bass from Justin.” Ellis and Suttor both worked at the underground bar, the latter joining after impressing the others during a punk rock karaoke night. “And then we just found Luke who had been in a band before,” she adds. 

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Dick Move released their first single in 2019, and the subsequent six years have seen them accrue some impressive achievements for a stringently DIY punk band: two well-received albums, Chop! (2020) and Wet (2023); a Taite Music Prize nomination for their second record; multiple European tours; support slots for rock royalty (Foo Fighters and The Breeders). 

Suttor is now a few days out from the release of the band’s third studio album, Dream, Believe, Achieve, which she says has been “stewing away for a long time.” 

“Did you feel pressure coming into the third [album]?” I ask. 

“That’s interesting… [I] feel like the second one is the easier one because you’ve found your identity as a band a little bit more and you’ve all gotten a little bit better at playing together. But then the third one… I don’t know, if you’ve found a little bit of success then you kind of have to prove something, or you decide if you’re going to go in another direction or stick with what you’ve got… with the other albums, we would write all of the songs and then record them. It was like they were already done and we’d already played them for a year. And so we knew them really well, whereas this time we had a little bit more time pressure.” 

Suttor and her bandmates recorded their new album at Auckland’s Roundhead Studios, which was “awesome,” she says, but it meant they “ended up actually having to write a few songs in the room, which we’ve never done before.” 

“I don’t think we’ll ever do that again,” she says after a beat. 

“I’ve always thought of Dick Move being a live band before a recording band…”

“I think so, yeah, because we’re not a jam band. The way that we write isn’t conducive to getting in a room and just jamming together… It’s very collaborative. Justin will write the music, come to the band, they will workshop it and then go over it in practice… I will take the music away and write to it in my own time and then bring it back, and then we keep working on it like that.” She pauses. “And we’re also really aware of the time pressure and the money that we were spending on being in a fancy recording [studio].”

Dick Move are a proper working-class band.

When they’re not coming together as self-styled “socialist-party punk agitators”, each member is busy with their day job. Ellis and Macrae remain in the music world, working in PR and labels, while Rendell acts as Whammy caretaker. “Luke has a proper grown-up job working in IT,” Suttor laughs, “so it was always really hard for him to get time off.”

It’s the band’s lead singer who may be the busiest of them all. While the rest have found jobs offering relative respite from the hectic pace of touring and recording, Suttor has thrown herself into studying nursing. 

“I’ve [just] finished my second year, [I] had my last exam on Monday,” she reveals. “And so I’m on holiday now. I’ve got this sweet student holiday where you literally are just free for four months!”

“When I first moved to New Zealand, I used to work at Auckland City Hospital,” I admit, “pushing the bins around.” 

“Yeah, I will probably eventually be there,” Suttor replies. “I’m studying, so I’m at AUT… I plan my year a year in advance, essentially, so a lot.”

Credit: Robin Laananen

About that album title: at first glance, Dream, Believe, Achieve reads like the insipid, faux-inspirational slogans an influencer would post in an Instagram tile (I’ll bet you, reader, that it would take you sub-10-minutes to find such a tile through a quick social media trawl), which is very close to the truth. 

“[I]t was a piece of inspirational art at an Airbnb on our first tour in Christchurch,” Suttor explains. “There were just those fucking motivational quotes all over the house and we were just looking at this one, ‘Dream, Believe, Achieve’, and we’re like, ‘There’s something funny about that,’ and we knew that we’d use it one day.”

The “yucky… grift-y” slogan, as Suttor puts it, seemed to contradict Dick Move’s DIY ethos, completely missing out the “Hard Work” portion, but they set about “reclaiming” it for their album title. 

“[A]nd then it just became the perfect name for this album because it’s about hope,” Suttor says. “Even in some of the angrier songs, like ‘Scared Old Men’ or ‘Handful’, I think there is still hope there… most of them are about mobilising and about people power and about, you know, uniting and coming together.”

The opening tracks on Dick Move’s first and most recent albums are twins, presented differently. Chop! begins with the Riot grrrl-indebted “Femoids Attack’, which wryly reclaims the dehumanising “femoid” term from modern incels (one can imagine Femoids Attack being the name of the second film in an exploitation double bill with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in the ‘60s). Five years later, though, when misogynists have been emboldened by the rise of far-right politics, Suttor has had enough. 

“You hate the way your words don’t hurt / I wear them on my skin / You love to see a girl on top / But you hate to see her win / Fuck it / Fuck it,” she shouts in the first 30 seconds of Dream, Believe, Achieve. The track has a blunt title: “Fuck It”. “What do you want from me / A slut and a mother / I’d like to see you get ahead / In a system built to fuck ya,” Suttor continues, her rage boiling over. “Fuck it / Fuck it / Fuck it.” 

From there, the pace and the fury is unrelenting. Suttor sings punk rallying cry after punk rallying cry, sounding as if her very life depends on getting these messages out. The entire album is a fierce repudiation of the wicked tenets of conservative politics and patriarchal systems: control, greed, misogyny, division, and misogyny some more. 

While she doesn’t think they’ve “ever been subtle,” stretching back to their debut album, Suttor acknowledges that they’ve “gotten a bit more direct, like ‘Bludger’, where we’re definitely talking about the bottom feeder thing.” She also mentions “Nurses”, probably the track she’s most proud of on the album. 

“I’m part of the [New Zealand Nurses Organisation] union and I got contacted by a spokesperson from the union to be like, ‘We love this, this is awesome, can we do a collab?’ And it was really unfortunate because I was literally just about to jump on a plane to go to Europe… so we couldn’t make it work in the end but I was like, ‘This is my dream,’ the union and the punk band coming together to do action… I’m sure we’ll work together in the future, but I was gutted.” The union will need to go back to the drawing board, though. “One of their ideas was that we do an acoustic or acapella version of the song at the strike and I was like, ‘[I] don’t think you could get Dick Move doing an acoustic version!”

Dick Move have been one of the hottest tickets in their hometown for years now.

Anyone who’s been at one of their shows in Auckland — usually in Whammy, occasionally elsewhere — will know that space is a luxury, or entirely non-existent. Whenever they played Whammy’s smaller backroom, one had to wriggle through masses just to grab a drink. Footage exists on YouTube of their set at Wellington’s Newtown Festival in 2023, but whoever is holding the camera is being jostled so much that the camera shakes violently throughout. 

If you managed to sneak a look around a crowd at one of their shows (despite being crammed to the side of someone’s armpit), you might have noticed something: the ‘quote unquote’ average Dick Move fan is difficult to ascertain. 

“I mean, we do have a lot of the old dads,” Suttor says when I bring this up. “They buy our records and they buy our t-shirts and we’re very happy for the dads. But I do love it when we have young people and like young non-males at the front of our shows… We always have girls on the front.”

At the start of 2024, Suttor and her bandmates faced an altogether more formidable crowd. Chosen to support the Foo Fighters on their Aotearoa tour, they went from typically playing in front of 500-odd people to warming up tens of thousands of rock fans. 

“[T]hat was a huge, huge deal,” Suttor says. “It was a huge stage, [that] was mainly the thing that was freaking us out because [we’d] never played standing so far away from each other, and then being so far away from the crowd and stuff.” 

Despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, the Foo Fighters — and their other support act, the Breeders — made sure Dick Move felt as comfortable as possible. 

“[E]veryone who worked on that show treated us like we were part of the show and not just like a little tag-along local band that was kind of a waste of time… they really took us in and looked after us.”

Suttor recalls with particular fondness the band’s first international tour with Australian punks Cosmic Psychos. “It was absolutely crazy because those guys are just the most wonderful hospitable big, big drinking party guys ever.” As the primary drinker in her band, Suttor rose to the occasion. “I had to really keep up with them [Cosmic Psychos] the whole time!” 

It’s small wonder that Cosmic Psychos asked Dick Move to tour with them, because Dick Move are a band so sonically aligned with classic Aussie pub-and-punk rock.

“We do this series at Rolling Stone called Musicians on Musicians. If we could pair you with any band, past or present, who would it be?” I ask Suttor. Her answer doesn’t surprise me.

“God, I feel like I’m really taking liberties by doing this on behalf of the whole band because I’m sure each one of us would have a different one. Okay, if it was Australian I’d say AC/DC. I’ve been seeing videos of it [AC/DC’s Australian tour]… everyone’s like, ‘No, they gotta give it up,’ but fuck that, I reckon it looks mean. And Amyl and the Sniffers are opening for them and that’s so sick. That’s why I love seeing them being so genuinely excited about opening for them.”

It’s the pre-eminent Aussie punks of their time, in fact, that Dick Move most closely resemble. 

Dick Move’s “Fuck It”, with the damning lyrics “[b]ut still I have to walk home / With my keyes clenched in my fist,” feels like a companion piece to Amyl’s 2021 song “Knifey”, in which Amy Taylor laments, “All I ever wanted was to walk by the park / All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars / Please, stop fucking me up.” 

In Taylor, Suttor has the ideal example of how to be a modern-day punk frontwoman: say what you want, when you want, naysayers be damned. Onstage at the 2025 ARIA Awards this week, Taylor called herself the new Prime Minister of Australia, declaring “[i]mmigrants welcome… Land back.” Never back down — even during Australian music’s biggest night of the year. “[I]t’s cool when they [Amyl and Amy] get to stand there and say the things they want to say — not just in the songs but they get up there and talk about it. And it’s really awesome,” Suttor says. 

Dick Move might be more political than even Amyl. Before every performance of “Bludger”, Suttor lets the crowd know that “this one’s about [New Zealand Prime Minister] Christopher Luxon and he’s a cunt.” 

“[W]e lay it all out there… They don’t have any shame in, you know, calling us bottom feeders and bludgers and pieces of shit, fuck them.” (For any overseas readers, a “bludger” is the slang term for an idler, a loafer; the current New Zealand PM, in other words.)

When politics comes up in conversation, Suttor is as unstoppable as she is onstage. 

“[I] get a lot of inspiration out of being involved with something so politically engaged,” she says. “I mean, that’s why we wrote ‘Nurses’, right? Because I’ve been so into what’s happening with the New Zealand public health care system and going to the strikes, and all of our songs are written about things that are immediately happening in the political landscape in New Zealand.”

Suttor is proud that they’re a band “that’s really into the public healthcare system,” and she hates that the New Zealand coalition government is “essentially destabilising, defunding, and privating the healthcare system. And it’s exactly what happened in America.”

That last comment is reminiscent of something that Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick — a close friend of the band, incidentally — told me a few months ago: that Luxon’s government is marked by a change of direction which “very much echoes an attempt to kind of model the United States of America.”

Suttor, just as Swarbrick was when we spoke, remains hopeful for the future. “[I]t’s so amazing to watch all this amazing strike action and mobilising of different unions coming together and fighting… the only way we can fix this is if we get rid of the government next year, get rid of the coalition that’s currently in… It’s a very empowering and exciting time, I think — for all the shit that’s happening, it means that the left really has to step up and we have to find good leadership and we have to find a way to save our public health system because it’s the backbone of any society, really.” (Just this week, what was estimated to be New Zealand’s longest-ever petition was delivered to Parliament, calling for the government to urgently fix the country’s health system; 90,000 signatories, including groups such as the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, now wait to see if the government will make any meaningful changes.)

Credit: Supplied

In back-to-back weeks in November, two of the most overtly political albums in a long time struck New Zealand music: Dream, Believe, Achieve arrived the Friday after Māori artist Theia released her debut album, Girl, in a Savage World; the two records, bonded as they are by a complete lack of subtlety (complimentary), are forthright responses to the current moment in New Zealand. 

Both Dick Move and Theia debuted in the latter half of the 2010s, when this country was under then-PM Jacinda Ardern, but heir new albums arrive under New Zealand’s most conservative government in a generation. Things are a lot different now. 

However you define ‘punk’ — as a genre, as a subculture, as an ideology — Dick Move are punk, and Theia is punk too. Suttor calling out Luxon at live shows is punk; Theia firing lines like “[p]lunder my motherland, pollute the sea” and “[y]ou are a cannibal, you brought the plague” in her track “BALDH3AD!” is also punk. 

In “Nurses”, Suttor sings “[w]e’re makin’ the bridge shake / Keep spitting ya hatred / Well it keeps us tough, motivated.” Those lyrics speak, she tells me, to the Te Tiriti Hikoi, the nationwide march which saw hundreds of thousands of Kiwis unite against the Treaty Principles Bill. “[W]e made the bridge shake and it’s like, keep spitting your hatred. We’ll just keep making the bridge shake.”

Suttor is excited to get back to doing what Dick Move do best: full-tilt live shows.

They kicked off their album tour at Double Whammy in Auckland last week, with shows still to come in Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington, Auckland again, and Whangārei. She’s excited to be playing two all-ages shows during this run, something they don’t get to do that often. “So we’re doing one in Dunedin and one in Auckland… [we] really want to get the youth.” 

They were just confirmed as one of the first recipients of NZ On Air’s New Music Project Touring (NMPT) pilot, a fund set up to help Aotearoa acts take their music on the road. The fund covers a range of touring costs, including transport, accommodation, marketing, and venue hire. In a small country with a music industry that’s often struggled post-pandemic, it’s a lifeline for bands like Dick Move. 

“[W]e’ve been very lucky with applying for funding and putting all of our money — basically any dollar that we earn goes towards putting stuff out and touring,” Suttor admits. “So we don’t make any money ourselves, but that’s why you’ve got to have jobs as well.” The “insanely expensive” process of touring and recording, she says, is counteracted by them putting “all of the money” that they make from shows or selling merch right back into the band. 

Dick Move know they will play to appreciative crowds up and down their home country, and they’ve discovered that overseas audiences understand them too — well, except for one thing. 

In Europe, she says, “no one knows what ‘Dick Move’ means… I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to explain what a ‘Dick Move’ is, but it’s hard enough doing that to people that speak English… So that was a struggle!” 

Confusing band name aside, European crowds, particularly in Spain, have been receptive to their political style of punk. 

“‘Cause that’s something that you face when you go to Europe is that not everyone has the same politics,” Suttor continues. “As a punk band, especially entering those spaces, it can be really confronting. And just knowing that there’s stuff that you can’t talk about, particularly with, you know, Palestine and things, that’s a really big one. And so it was always a real relief when we’d go into a Spanish bar and they’ve got the Palestinian flag and Palestinian graffiti… and [I’m] not saying that it was bad in Germany and stuff but it’s definitely like, there’s a tension that you can’t talk about…”

In late January, Dick Move will head to Australia, where they’ll play venues tailor-made for them such as Melbourne’s Last Chance Rock & Roll Bar. “[W]e always have an awesome time in Melbourne,” Suttor says. 

Dick Move would fit seamlessly into Australia’s punk landscape (in the span of our conversation, Suttor expresses her love of Stiff Richards and Our Carlson alongside Acca Dacca and Amyl), but they’re one of the Auckland bands; it doesn’t feel like there’s any chance of them leaving their hometown behind like The Band From Wellington. 

“Obviously there’s been quite a bit of talk about Auckland’s struggling music scene…” I begin but Suttor interjects with a grin. 

“What?! What are they saying?! What the!” 

“It seems like everyone’s moving to Christchurch! Would you ever consider moving elsewhere?”

“I think the biggest thing [in Auckland] is music venues shut down, and that’s a huge part of it,” she answers. “That really splinters communities and makes things hard… we’ve lost so many good music venues in the last 10 years, but we’ve still got Whammy, and Whammy is just absolutely holding it [together] for everyone. I mean, we would never leave. We’re so deeply, deeply entrenched in Karangahape Road and Whammy Bar.”

“It must be so great to have a venue like that as your band’s home base.”

“I know, we’re very lucky. I mean, that’s why we practice every single week, all year, pretty much, even when we’re not touring. So we’re lucky we have a space and [some] people don’t have that — [we’re] very privileged in that regard.” 

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Anticipation in the New Zealand music community has been high for Dream, Believe, Achieve.

Dick Move’s previous album, Wet, was one of 10 finalists for the Taite Music Prize in 2023, losing out to Flying Nun labelmate Vera Ellen. 

When I ask Suttor outright if awards acclaim is something she and her bandmates care about, she chooses her words carefully. 

“I think the amount of care for that kind of thing varies [from] band member to band member… I care about it because I think I have been, how do I say this? We’ve been nominated for the Tate before for our second album, and that was a massive deal to me. 

“You know, going overseas and playing in Europe and stuff is cool, but I love having the support of our people here — especially as a punk band, as a female-fronted punk band, you don’t get massive amounts of play in mainstream radio or mainstream festivals, which is something that should change, but to be a punk band that breaks through into those big awards, it does mean a lot to me. I’m like, ‘Shit yeah, they’re listening.’ 

“It’s good fun being at the [Silver] Scrolls and stuff, even though obviously we weren’t nominated, but we played at the Scrolls as well last year and that was fucking awesome. 

“‘Cause you know, we were so wildly different [from] the other bands that were playing… it felt like we were a funny little wild card… Any chance to say your bit is good, I think.”

We discuss Chris Bishop’s tantrum at the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards in May, when the senior government minister claimed that Stan Walker’s performance constituted “overt politicking.” Bishop’s needless tirade earned him a dressing down from musician and national treasure Don McGlashan. A Dick Move performance, I tell Suttor, would have given Bishop a conniption. 

“I would love that. It would be so fun. Yeah, I think it’s fun to be a cheeky little DIY punk band at the big fancy shows,” she says. 

Since the early ‘90s, when Nirvana exploded into the mainstream and Green Day went from Kerplunk! (independent) to Dookie (major label), punk and rock bands have been endlessly confronted with the ‘sellout’ tag.

For a subculture and scene that prides itself on authenticity above all else, anything deemed to clash with this ethos — joining a big label, performing on too big of a stage — is simply not on. 

And for Suttor and Dick Move, being a DIY punk band in a part of the world notorious for its Tall Poppy Syndrome, avoiding being perceived as a ‘sellout’ is perhaps an even more arduous challenge. Playing with the fucking Foo Fighters was always going to upset a handful of punk diehards; Suttor, however, knew it was something they couldn’t turn down. 

“When you have the opportunity to play to people that aren’t inside your bubble, that might not have listened to your music or might not even talk about your politics or feel comfortable talking about your politics or whatever, having the opportunity to be exposed to those people, I think, is great.

“That’s one thing I took away from Foo Fighters actually — this is like 10,000 dudes who probably had no idea who we were… I don’t know where they sit politically or whatever, but I’m sitting there screaming about women’s rights and about politics and about all the stuff. It’s awesome. I love doing that and I love [getting] the chance to start those conversations.”

Suttor’s attitude isn’t selling out — far from it. If Dick Move changed their style, or toned down their lyrics, to suit bigger crowds and people different to them — that would be selling out. But retaining the same politics and beliefs that first connected you all those years ago in those late-night dive bar yarns? That’s authentic. That’s punk. 

Dick Move’s Dream, Believe, Achieve is out now via 1:12 Records and Flying Nun Records.