De Staat takes us through the drama, decadence and delirious pace of their expansive self-titled album.
THE KING
'THE KING’ might be the loudest thing we’ve ever made.
On the endless destructive cycle of power. A king falls, a new one is crowned immediately. History repeats, the lust for power is as old as time, and corruption is always nearby.
The music and lyrics are purposefully repetitive and cyclical for that reason. Simple. Simplistic maybe. Actually inspired by the sound of my washing machine. Slowly building to a distorted climax. It felt like THE KING was the basis for the album, and therefore the opener. Perhaps not the most catchy song, but we’re too old for that shit anyway. The video shorts, directed with Matties Grooten, set a stage with a stairway made of scaffolding, as a ‘stairway to power’, where the one on top gets pushed off by the next in line. This stairway is also the set piece for the ‘DE STAAT BECOMES DE STAAT’ show.
THE FIRE
About complacency from this side of the world: the comfortable assumption that disaster is something that happens on the other side of ‘the screen’, far from our own lives. About that feeling I have when I’m watching forest fires on TV while eating potato chips. “New car, new war, watch the battles at the bar”. You know, horrific things happen around the world, while you’re thinking about installing solar panels on your roof. It’s about that strange position of comfort, while knowing about the extreme discomfort in other parts of the world. It’s about inaction, but also about guilt. I could be doing more. The song sits in that quiet space between knowing and doing I guess: You watch it burn, and still nothing about your day really changes. Until it finally will, perhaps. If I’m pointing fingers, I’m definitely pointing at me too.
Musically, it’s what we oftentimes love to do. Combining kind of a happy, peppy vibe with heavy sounds, just like the duality of the lyrics.
THE UNDERDOG
‘THE UNDERDOG’ is about the idea of a moment when the division in society becomes so great, that left and right, young and old, every background, finally come together. Not united in love, but in hate: hatred towards the people in power, and hate towards the system. It sometimes feels like hatred unites people more effectively than shared values ever could.
“From left to right and black to white
With our hands now intertwined
On our way for the boys at the top
When we grow up, this is what we’ll be
Just a violent harmony
Now sink your teeth in the boys at the top”
Actually, a track we’ve recorded maybe more than 5 years ago, but couldn’t get it to make sense, until now. Also one of the rare songs where I mostly sing falsetto.
FREEDOM
AI, just a topic I couldn’t not write about. On its promise and its threat at once.
“Oh what a joy, nothing is real, your hands off the wheel, it doesn’t matter, now we are free”.
The beauty about the English word “Free” is that it’s double-edged. It means liberated, but also without cost (worthless, given away).
Will we be free: will AI give us a future of abundance, or will we be free: expendable and therefore worthless?
Musically, I feel this one is almost a modern crooner, it’s definitely a song where I explore my vocal capabilities, and sing a lot lower than I usually do.
THE NOISE
I love this song because the riff is quite heavy but also brainy. It fuels the whole song. Lyrically it’s two things.
About hearing loss: when you lose your hearing, it becomes harder and harder to differentiate between different sources — between the noise and the thing you actually want to hear — until you reach the point where you just start to check out, because you can’t follow. Which serves as a metaphor for overstimulation: the same thing happens with the constant stream of information, opinions and stimuli — you lose the ability to tell the noise apart from what actually matters, until it all just becomes noise and nothing hits you anymore.
GLORY
This is my sarcastic anthem for people in power. Sometimes when I hear them speak — these boys who’ve been high up in power for a very long time — it’s so obvious they haven’t set foot on the ground in years.
“A man, an ant. A city, a pile. A river, a line”.
A lot of tech CEOs are exemplary of this, in my opinion, where they operate at such a macro level, that they seem to have lost all sense of normalcy. As if people are not individuals, but just a big flow of information.
The gospel choir sample (which is a widely used sample if you pay attention), is what started this song, and to me it fuels that religious, near messianic space some of these people seem to be living in.
THE BOY
This is definitely one of the most distinct songs of the album, I think. I’ve written this on piano, and just worked on it over a year’s time, slowly shaping it into what it is. When we started working on it with the whole group, it turned into a really lively melancholic production of sounds that just fell into place.
At first glance, this might be interpreted as something that doesn’t fit the album, compared to the dystopian darkness of most of the other tracks, but lyrically I think this is one of the pieces of the puzzle.
'THE BOY’ is about my search for my younger self: playful and vulnerable. I think a lot of boys, when they hit puberty, start to build walls around their vulnerability and emotions, so they aren’t ‘a mark’ in high school. Around that age it feels like a superpower if it seems you can’t get sad or cry or be easily upset. As I grew older, and now especially as a young father, I realise these walls were built. They now are the opposite of a superpower, and it actually takes a lot of effort to demolish them. So my search for THE BOY is actually my search for my more vulnerable side, and empathy.
And this is important, I think, because a lot of men in positions of power have these walls up high and fortified, and lack the empathy to be in this position.
Which brings us to ‘THE MAN’.
THE MAN
This is the simplistic version of the man. Where anger is the main emotion, and the fear of being patronised is all encompassing.
“Fuck around and find out”, to me, summarises that. Don’t mess with me or I will come and get you.
Just the opposite of THE BOY.
THE MATTER
THE MATTER is about mortality and insignificance, anchored by the repeated line “So now you know, It doesn’t even matter.”
I guess it’s about that moment that could happen multiple times in your life where you suddenly realise that nothing really makes sense, and everything seems trivial. How many of your choices actually decide something? These feelings creep up on me more and more nowadays, and I don’t really know why that is. To me, on this album, it made sense to share that. Perhaps it’s because I feel the world is moving in a direction I have little influence over.
FAITH
'FAITH’ is about the thing I think makes us human more than anything else: our ability to believe in stories, and to build entire realities on top of them. Borders, money, power, heaven: none of it exists physically, it’s all just something we’ve collectively agreed to believe in, and because we believe, it becomes real. “Fences in the valley, draw the line”: a border is just an idea until enough people believe in it, and then suddenly it’s something you can die for, or die trying to cross. Devils and angels show up on both sides of that same line, depending on who’s telling the story. I wanted to end the album here because it ties the whole thing together: THE KING, GLORY, FREEDOM — it’s all stories people believe in, and the ones in power know exactly how to use that. “Where there is fear, there is faith” is the whole mechanism in one line: give people something to be afraid of, and they’ll believe almost anything that offers them safety. But this is not about “them”; it’s about me.
“I believe, I believe, in the tales I need.” I need my own stories too, to make sense of things, same as everyone else. It’s also something hopeful: “we can write history”, if so many people believe these stories, then it’s possible they could believe something entirely different too.
