PERSONAL TRAINER "BIG LOVE BLANKET" OUT NOVEMBER 4TH
Amsterdam's much-tipped seven-piece Personal Trainer return today with news that their debut album, "Big Love Blanket", is landing on November 4th. It follows two excellent singles this year, and a debut EP "Gazebo" that landed mid-pandemic on tastemaker label Holm Front (Walt Disco, Krush Puppies, Sports Team).
The ten tracks of "Big Love Blanket" display a playful diversity of sounds and influences, landing on one all of their own that has been championed as "rapturously fun" by Ones To Watch, "incredibly catchy indie-led pop" by Record Of The Day, "curious and endearing" by Steve Lamacq, "remarkable" by CLASH and even compared to LCD Soundsystem by Marc Riley. The first song to be released ahead of the album, "Key Of Ego", was one of NME's New Bangers too, and rightly so.
Personal Trainer today also share a live favourite, "The Lazer", a song that has undergone several reinventions across the band's lifespan and lands today in its final, celebratory state.
Willem Smit says of their new single:
"The Lazer" was one of the first songs we ever wrote together a band. To me "The Lazer" always felt like my big Personal Trainer anthem. We used to have this shifting line-up situation where I didn’t want to rehearse much, so I wanted to make songs that were very easy to play. “Can you play an A chord and a D chord? Do you want to be in my band?” was the vibe. And that’s "The Lazer."
It’s easily the oldest song on the record, most trainers hate it - that’s probably because we play it nearly every show, and we played it for an hour straight during our 24-hour show last year - but it always stuck with me. It feels like a logical decision to put it on our first long record."
"The Lazer" is paired to a DIY video, self-recorded at Willem and his girlfriend's house, with Willem in front of "the wall", upon which eagle-eyed PT fans will see mounted all sorts of trinkets and memories from the band so far, including the artwork for all their singles, the latest for "The Lazer" being a drawing of a band playing a live show that Willem scribbled down himself when he was little. As the saying goes, some are born to do it.
"The Lazer", as with the rest of "Big Love Blanket", was co-produced by regular collaborator Casper van der Lans and WIllem himself.
Personal Trainer are the brainchild of Willem Smit, the band's front man and a multi-instrumentalist whose early talents saw his last band, Canshaker Pi, record with Stephen Malkmus while still teenagers. Personal Trainer began as an attempt to bottle the fervent energy of Amsterdam's indie scene and to allow for something entirely unpredictable on stage and in the studio - an ever-shifting line-up of friends and peers playing together with only one rule: there are no rules.
