If you like pop music to keep you on your toes, Amsterdam’s Personal Trainer provide that service fulsomely on their second album. Essentially the project of Willem Smit (working with co-producer/collaborator Casper van der Lans) on record and a band live, Personal Trainer showed a facility for DIY indie-pop exuberance and experiment in sync with 2022’s debut, Big Love Blanket. Now signed to Bella Union, Willem returns re-energised with Still Willing, a multi-faceted album of shining contrasts and spry melodies, bursting arrangements and subliminal sounds, playful lyrics and self-reflection: in short, a pop album executed with dynamism, vim and charm.
As Willem says, this is a record fuelled by its extremes: sometimes energetic and loud, sometimes quiet and thoughtful, always full of hidden pleasures. “When I listen to the records I make, the main thing I hope is that every time something happens on them, you’re like, ‘Wow.’ I like to be taken by surprise like that on a record, to kind of be thrown around.”
Witty, welcoming and winningly melodic, Still Willing is the sound of an instinctive DIY-pop musician favouring think-on-your-feet exploration and intuition over know-it-all premeditation.
Dinked 300
- White vinyl *
- Bonus ‘Intangible’ white 7” featuring White Denim remix *
- 16 Page A5 Fanzine *
- Signed Trading Card *
- Limited pressing of 600 *
*EXCLUSIVE to Dinked Edition
Also available on standard Black vinyl and CD.
Tracklisting
1. Upper Ferntree Gully
2. I Can Be Your Personal Trainer
3. Cyan
4. Round
5. New Bad Feeling
6. Intangible
7. Testing The Alarm
8. Still Willing
9. You Better Start Scrubbing
10. What Am I Supposed To Say And Their ways
Bella Union
