Much like many of the acts currently emerging from the Netherlands, The Klittens don’t disappoint with their unique mix of punk ethos and poppy sounds.
Listening to their new EP Butter is an unusually uplifiting experience, one that focuses on the message of people trying to find their place in the world, with clever lyrics and intricate melodies working well together to make a hard sentiment seem light. The band all perform beautifully on the recordings with a pleasing mix and the characteristic chatty nature of the vocals bringing across a very personal touch – feeling like they are singing straight to you. Each piece has its own identity whilst the EP exhibits an overarching theme and sound, making for a consistent yet varied listen.
Having recently embarked on their ‘Triple Dutch’ UK tour alongside compatriots Personal Trainer and Real Farmer, I met the band ahead of their final date to discuss their new EP, their musical style and creative process, plus their thoughts on the music scene in general. Meeting in a busy Sheffield city centre pub, amid hordes of football fans waiting for kick-off, we escaped upstairs for a pint and a chat.
So to start off, how did it all begin?
Winnie Conradi: We started 5 years ago – me, Yaël and Katja were all studying together and had this idea of forming a band which came out quite spontaneously. We had some high school experience, I had a guitar that I hadn’t really touched and that’s kind of how it started. We were all kind of at the same base level of we like music, we want to start a band, but we’re all not really musicians. Then, we found another non-musician who used to be a drummer in high school, and then our former bassist Michelle was my long-time friend.
I think a lot of bands start out that way – you like how these instruments sound and this sounds good maybe so we should form a band…
WC: We actually wanted a platform for our political ideas and I was like, “how do we get an audience for political ideas? Oh, we should be on a stage and we should make music”, and then the idea of a band arrived after that.
I saw on your Bandcamp page that you label yourselves as indie-fuzz and DIY, was that a naturally occurring thing that happened or did you start out with the mindset of going for that?
Yaël Dekker: We like to do everything about it ourselves. We’re not only excited to get on the stage but excited to look for venues, make our own t-shirts… I think in that sense we set out to be DIY, but we just did that, and then we realised there’s a name for it.
WC: I think with labels it’s always a bit difficult.
As a music journalist it can be hard to label things, and with your music it’s definitely pop sounding – but it doesn’t sound like indie pop to me. It feels rocky and there is that fuzziness with the effects you use as well which is really cool, so is that how you came up with indie-fuzz label?
Laurie Zantinge: I think also in the first place we wanted to be a punk band. We started writing songs but they all ended up being more indie-poppy. It’s a funny thing that we want to be a punk band and every song that came out just was punk in a different way. Not like rock, but more indie-pop. I think that is more why we had to adjust our genre to include ‘fuzz’ – like the ‘fuzz’ part makes it little more edgier.
YD: Even the word indie-fuzz means nothing to me.
WC: It also depends who we are talking to.
YD: I like it when people call it post-punk because I like the words better than indie-fuzz.
It’s good that you’re not too tied to a genre because a lot of bands get stuck with that and get tied down. Moving on, how has the UK tour gone so far?
All: Amazing, we love it!
LZ: I think this is the fourth or fifth time we’ve toured the UK, and we keep coming back because it’s just so great. The whole music scene is so much better here than in The Netherlands. I mean, it’s also great there, but here in the UK it feels like there’s way more interesting alternative music and people are also way nicer here than in The Netherlands, if I can say that. The crowd is always listening, and then after the show they come say hi to you and are very sweet.
YD: We have fans over here, we had people come to our show yesterday and the day before from Carlisle, so they travelled like 10 hours just to see us twice which is so sweet. It feels like bigger, there’s more people, but it also feels more real because you actually talk to people and you actually have interaction.
WC: Yeah it really feels like you play a show here and you know that there’s going to be people here who just appreciate what you do, and in The Netherlands it almost feels like you have to fight for people’s attention and approval. It feels like you’re stood in a room full of judges, but I mean we’ve had a lot of nice shows in The Netherlands.
LZ: It’s a lot more like a community here, a big, huge-ass community.
Let’s talk about the Butter – I’m loving it. Can you take me through the process of writing it?
Katja Kahana: We started in October 2022 so a bit more than a year ago.
YD: Yeah, we recorded in January the following year, and then it took us two months to make the rest and polish it.
LZ: With our previous EP Cactus, we wanted to record some scraps of some songs we’d put together. It sounds like we didn’t think about what we were putting on the EP, but we had some songs ready and we were like “ok, we’re going to record them and release them”. With this EP we wanted to sit down, write songs and make a record.
YD: No, it’s the opposite! We said this is going to be a moment in time or a snapshot, and then we’re going to work very long on the album.
LZ: But we did two weekends of writing songs.
YD: That’s not super long for an EP – woah, two whole weekends!
LZ: Like the purpose was to write songs.
YD: And be quick about it.
Listening to it I did feel like there was a theme to all of it and I was going to ask if was that on purpose?
WC: What was the theme for you?
It felt like an EP all about personal growth, reflecting on yourself and how you fit in in society.
YD: We were talking about it afterwards, and that was what we came upon – that sort of coming of age when you’re kind of too old to become of age. Like a second coming of age…
So it was more of a natural way of coming together in this theme?
YD: For this EP we did have somewhat of an experiment where everybody supplied a base, sometimes more of a finished idea and then sometimes more just bits and pieces, so everybody could be the a director of one song. Everyone could pick their own themes in some sense, but yeah we’re all in the same age category, phase, life crisis.
WC: I think it worked out so nicely though because I think Laurie with ‘Traffic Light’ had an idea, maybe 10 or 20 seconds of the song, and then we worked from there. Katja had like 2000 melodies and was like “I want to fit all of these into one song” and we were like “let’s work on it together”. I don’t know, it’s just nice that it doesn’t really matter what one of us would bring in, we all Klitten-fied it in the end together.
If we just go through each track – what can you tell me about ‘Universal Experience’?
YD: I guess in the writing process I can be the most stagnant, or the most conservative, I guess. I feel like the rest can be a lot more adaptable, and I think with ‘Universal’ I could kind of let go more and everyone could add to it and sing on it. I didn’t feel like it had many rules music-wise and lyrically it’s about like “yeah sure I totally know what you’re talking about because I look like I’ve experienced it, and you believe that I’ve experienced it, so let’s just pretend for the rest of our lives that I do know what you’re talking about.” That’s basically it.
Is that based on experience yourself?
YD: Yeah, I didn’t have the best or the most conventional childhood, and I felt like you wanna try to pretend at some point so you can have, like, a car and stuff. So yeah, it’s about that basically.
I really liked the saxophone in it, it really mellows the song out.
WC: Yeah we asked a friend to come in – it was my former roommate, so that was nice. I think it just happened in a conversation with him about maybe having him come to the studio and try something. He came to the studio and went [makes sax noise] and finished like three of the songs on saxophone.
How about ‘Atlas’?
KK: Well like we said, I really like writing melodies, so I wrote melody, on melody, on melody for that one. I kept putting layers on it and then Yaël wrote the lyrics for it.
So you had loads of melodies that you wanted to shove in one song?
KK: I got a couple together, but at some point I didn’t know where to put them anymore because they weren’t all in the same key and also the rhythm changed here and there so it got difficult. I brought it to the rest of the band and we made it work. We tried a fugue as well, that took a while.
The song is about making promises that you can’t keep – is that a message to everyone, or did you have someone specific in mind when you wrote the lyrics?
YD: No I think it was for everyone, or more the concept of like – people change so much, you’re gonna promise something from a perspective you don’t have yet. I’ll say I love you in 20 years, but how the fuck do I know how I am in 20 years?
Talk me through ‘Reading Material’.
WC: I wrote ‘Reading Material’ like 4 years ago I think, and then I sent it to you guys. At that time I was like, “I want to finish this” and they would say “it’s already finished, it’s perfect”. I never did finish it. For this EP I was like “ok, if you guys think it’s finished, let’s throw it on the EP and we’re good to go.” I think the challenge was to make the sort of 8-bit version that I made in Garageband, it was only like 8 synthesisers and I had to translate that into real instruments and make it sound like those 8 parts. I wanted to have this warm bedroom feel.
Do you use Garageband a lot?
WC: I’ve used it since I was four and my dad has always had Mac computers so I was always like [makes beep noises] making shitty songs.
So you say you’re not a musician but…
WC: Now I do say that I’m a musician, but it’s been a bit of a process. Coming into spaces where there are conversations where people are like “are you a musician?” I now feel comfortable to say “yes I am”, but it took me a while.
Who wrote ‘Eye Contact’?
Marrit Meinema: That one was written by Michelle.
Did she write all of it or was it a collaboration between you all?
WC: She made a first version that she was really happy with but we were like “this is impossible to play, sorry”. It was really cool but it had almost no structure and also too repetitive.
LZ: I was also annoyed that there were no drums in it at all. [laughter]
WC: I think we thought the idea of having no structure was really cool but we tried to play it and we just couldn’t do it. We started working on it and while recording we thought realised it kind of dies in the middle so how could we keep it interesting?
YD: It was the biggest puzzle.
WC: I’m happy that we came to a project that everyone, including Michelle, was really really happy with.
What’s the song about?
WC: I think it’s very much like a high school coming of age story.
YD: Yeah this was a literal reflection I think.
WC: Reflecting on it as an adult.
And then the last song on the EP, ‘Traffic Light’.
LZ: I don’t really have an interesting story, but I sometimes sit at home, open Garageband and go “ok I’m going to write a song now but I’m not really good at playing guitar”. Sometimes it’s quite frustrating because I’ll have a melody or song in my head but I don’t know how to translate it to the guitar or to Garageband, but I want to play it on guitar because on keyboard or anything else it doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound. I just wrote a melody and made up some chords, but I don’t actually know if they’re real chords that you play. Yaël wrote the lyrics, and I think we had a melody before writing the lyrics.
Do you think that Butter links with your last EP Citrus and do you think you’ve grown more?
YD: I think our confidence grew a lot. I think we aren’t as questioning anymore, not that we were looking for affirmation. It’s just a lot more firm.
WC: I think we trusted our intuition better.
YD: On the stage as well.
KK: I do think it has some sort of shadows of earlier songs in it so yeah, it is like a weird amalgamation of songs that you can link back to previous songs. In that sense, I think ’Manic Dixi’ and ‘Universal’ sound similar.
Which bands are you liking at the moment?
WC: Real Farmer, who we are on tour with, they are my favourite Dutch band. I’ve been into Chanel Beads a lot as well.
What do you like about the music scene?
LZ: I think it really differs with person, like I know I have a very specific taste when I’m looking at bands at the moment. I show bands to the band where I’m like “this band is so cool everybody knows them”, and they’re like “what the fuck is this band I’ve never heard of them”.
WC: The Amsterdam scene, or at least the part that we slip in to, has the community vibe that I was looking for in Amsterdam. It’s just some people you can always run into and the scene is not competitive at all. It’s so welcoming for us, and everyone tries to support one another, play together and come to each other’s show.
What don’t you like?
YD: I don’t know, I think for me it would be nice if there was a bit more of an underground scene. We had a very cool venue in The Hague which was a squatting centre with an amazing studio and an amazing space but it got shut down. I feel like you can’t go to a total shithole, independent venues are not like it is in the UK.
WC: Same for the music journalism in The Netherlands – it’s so polished and white, old or middle aged men writing and using their references to talk about new bands. It doesn’t resonate with me at all.
That’s why I put this disguise on…
YD: Yeah you’re a white old man writing for the Telegraph.
I think it’s quite widespread as an issue. I didn’t realise that it was like that in The Netherlands particularly.
WC: There’s not really that much room for younger people to write about music, you have some smaller blogs but most of them are dying out.
What about influences, do you think you can hear your influences in your music?
WC: I find it very difficult I actually don’t like to listen to music that much anymore except when I go to see concerts. I also found that I used to listen to music to keep the noise down, but I I don’t need that so much anymore.
YD: To me it’s tiny tidbits in our songs, for ‘Manic Dixi’ I wanted to sound like Elvis in the refrain, and for others they said it channelled Dido for the refrain, but those are very specific bits.
LZ: People always compare us to Breeders and The Raincoats, I don’t know why, I like the bands but…
I always ask this last question, and I ask everyone and it’s not music related at all. What are your favourite colours?
YD: Yellow, it makes me happy.
WC: Green and red, but if I had to pick one it’s gonna be red.
YD: I’m like a child, I’m like “maybe I like red as well…”
WC: No, you like yellow, you can only like yellow now. Red is a colour that suits me so I steer to it.
KK: I kind of like all colours that are close to grey but not grey yet. Very subtle colours, like it’s possible in every colour, when the colour is not there anymore.
LZ: Sometimes when we do a gig, we pick a colour to wear and say “ok, we’re all gonna wear yellow tonight”. We are all just struggling to find something yellow to wear, and then Katja shows up in grey and that’s Katja’s sort of style. I like it.
Whats the colour for tonight?
MM: Whatever’s clean.
LZ: I want to say pink, I have pink drumsticks and a pink shaker. I used to hate it as I thought it was too girly.
I was exactly the same!
LZ: I’m embracing it now
MM: My favourite colour is green, I always switch between the emerald green one and the apple green one; it makes me happy and calm at the same time.
Words: Ruth Alexander // Photos: Jade Sastropawiro
‘Butter’, the second EP by The Klittens, is out now. Stream or purchase the EP via Bandcamp.