From the first tolling notes of their latest offering, Onschuld, Dutch coldwave outfit Desinteresse seize the listener by the marrow, as if the music has always been playing somewhere, in another room, behind another wall. This is their first true studio album, with their voices and instruments carried across tape like candle smoke curling in the rafters.
Desinteresse formed in austerity in 2022: Bart Vranken’s bass lines sharp as wire, Sem van den Munckhof’s voice a howl between lament and invocation, and later, Joppe de Swart’s drums anchoring the storm. Their attic beginnings were raw recordings captured in one take, huddled in the heat of Sem’s room. Onschuld, however, recorded at Amsterdam’s Lullabye Factory with full analogue discipline, is another creature entirely.
There is lineage here that Desinteresse gleefully exhumes: Joy Division’s glacial pulse, the ritualistic dirge of The Cure at their most desolate, the forlorn cries of Medusa-era Clan of Xymox. More arcane still, the ghost of Shōjoningyō and the French minimalists Trop Tard haunt these songs. The trio handles tape and amplifier like relic and ritual, chasing a presence the way the air thickens in old records of Faith or Pornography. Each track is driven by Sem’s voice, pleading, primal, an instrument equal to Vranken’s serrated bass or De Swart’s thunder.
The album speaks Dutch in both its title and lyrics, but in that refusal of translation lies its seduction, evoking a sense of an underground vinyl or cassette release circa 1981. For those who don’t speak the band’s mother tongue, the words appear as artifacts: opaque, charged, waiting for the listener’s projection, as the vocals overflow with timeless passion and sorrow. Silhouet, inspired by Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad, moves like corridors folding back upon themselves; Denkt U?, drawn from the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, feels like a dispatch smuggled across centuries, like a letter read by candlelight in an old Victorian manor.
Elsewhere, Niets Te Zeggen and the title track offer silence and ambiguity as their own form of testimony, like a lament for monks dancing in a cathedral. Fantomen, penned by Vranken, is perhaps the record’s axis: a procession of thick bass and drums that trudges like pallbearers marching through the winter snow, while synths flicker as votive flames. The atmosphere is not one of theatre but of confession, as if the band are less performers than witnesses.
While Onschuld certainly has relentless gloom, the album also gives us the strange clarity that gloom permits. The album trusts the listener to step into the dark and find their own reflection. The task of art is, in the words of author James Agee, “to gaze upon it and, in so doing, to be gazed upon.” That reciprocity breathes in every track here. Onschuld lingers, like memory, like guilt, like faith bruised but unbroken. Desinteresse have made the threshold. Step through.
Listen to Onschuld below and order the album here.
Desinteresse will be touring the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the UK this autumn. Full dates below:
Live Dates:
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Oct 3 TivoliVredenburg Utrecht, Netherlands
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Oct 5 OJC Niks Horst, Netherlands
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Nov 3 Neue Zukunft Berlin, Germany
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Nov 4 Stage 2, Voodoo Club Warsaw, Poland
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Nov 5 Klub pod Minogą Poznan, Poland
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Nov 13 Hootananny Brixton, UK
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Nov 29 Grounds Rotterdam, Netherlands
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