De Staat have built a reputation as one of Europe’s most inventive and fearless live acts, continually pushing at the boundaries of what a rock band can be. Their music moves between industrial grooves, heavy riffs, experimental electronica and pop sensibilities, while their work has long explored themes of power, demagoguery and mass manipulation.
Those ideas take on a renewed urgency on the Nijmegen band’s seventh album, DE STAAT. Following a two-year hiatus, the album finds De Staat returning to the themes that have run through their work for much of the past 25 years, confronting power, misinformation and the increasingly blurred line between reality and fiction. For frontman Torre Florim, the album’s title reflects the strange realisation that the band’s name and everything they have created seem to have been unconsciously building towards this moment.
DE STAAT arrives on the 18th of September via V2 Records. To mark the release of DE STAAT, we’ve asked De Staat to share three of the key musical influences behind the album as part of our Under the Influence feature.
Death Grips – The Money Store
This record cracked open my producer’s mind. It feels so unfiltered and blunt, and it hits me with pure adrenaline. As a maker, I’m often chasing energy. When I make music, my heart needs to start pounding faster. This album does exactly that: the production is unpolished, unconventional, blunt, and it opened my mind to making more unusual choices in production and mixing. Something doesn’t always have to sound “nice and thick”. It can be thin and sparse and hit even harder because of it. Death Grips gives off energy, and sometimes it’s still a mystery to me how it works. That’s what keeps pulling me back to this album. At its core, it’s not a thought, it’s a feeling: raw, brute energy.
The vocals are just as unique, just as raw as the production. Sometimes they’re timed strangely early, and that’s exactly what makes them work. It’s something I myself would never have done as a vocalist in that moment.
Queens Of The Stone Age – Rated R
Honestly, I rarely listen to QOTSA anymore, but they had such a massive influence on my young musician’s brain that they simply can’t go unmentioned. I saw the Queens for the first time on TV, and it flipped my idea of what a band could be upside down. They weren’t trying to please an audience, they were just doing their own thing. That’s what it seemed like anyway. They had three different vocalists and a completely unique sound: the low muffled guitar tone combined with Josh Homme’s languid vocals. It felt like a gang of outlaws I wanted to belong to as a young teenager. It spoke to something tribal in me. The whole desert rock scene was something I felt at home in back then.
It changed my direction: just hang hard in your thing, or something. Rated R is one of my favourites because it’s such a varied album. It almost feels like a great mixtape, which is something I’ve always loved and something I think we always aim for on our own albums too.
Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense
Honestly, this is the only live album I listen to on a regular basis. In my opinion, it sounds better than most Talking Heads studio albums. This might not necessarily be the album that inspires me most, it’s more David Byrne as a frontman and creator. This album is a beautiful summary of what Talking Heads is. It also highlights something I feel is missing more and more these days: it’s genuinely live. You can feel these are real people. Can’t believe that’s considered something worth mentioning nowadays. No click track, no sequencers running along with backing vocals and percussion. No perfection makes perfect. This show is legendary, of course, and completely unique in its structure and concept, but David Byrne’s last few shows are still some of the most groundbreaking I’ve seen, compared to most artists coming up today.
