Dutch art-rock provocateurs De Staat continue their return from a two-year hiatus with the release of THE UNDERDOG, the fourth single to emerge from their forthcoming seventh album, DE STAAT (THE STATE), due 18th September via V2 Records.
Following their return in April with THE KING and the subsequent arrival of THE FIRE, the new track takes the band somewhere considerably darker and more unexpected. Driven by a distorted, processed organ and an increasingly imposing bass-heavy arrangement, THE UNDERDOG builds from an unusually vulnerable vocal performance into a towering finale.
De Staat
At the centre of the song is a familiar De Staat concern: power and the consequences of its abuse. But while previous material has often examined manipulation, misinformation and political influence from an observational distance, THE UNDERDOG shifts the perspective towards those at the bottom who have finally had enough.
Frontman Torre Florim explains that the band’s long-standing fascination with power, faith and the boundary between reality and fiction has taken on a new urgency. The title DE STAAT — chosen 25 years after the band first formed — has consequently acquired an unexpected resonance. “As a band, we’ve long explored ideas around power, faith, and the increasingly blurred line between reality and fiction,” Florim explains. “The world we’re living in has pulled us further down that dark path, and suddenly it feels as though the name we chose 25 years ago has taken on a whole new weight – as if everything we’ve made has been unconsciously building towards this moment.”
That sense of accumulated history gives the new album an added significance. De Staat have spent their career refusing to sit comfortably within the conventional boundaries of rock, moving between industrial grooves, heavy riffs, electronic experimentation and pop instincts while using their music to examine the systems and behaviours that shape society. THE UNDERDOG continues that tradition, but does so through a track that is arguably more emotionally exposed than much of the band’s previous work.
The song imagines a coalition of the disaffected — people from radically different backgrounds and political perspectives — finding common ground through their shared frustration with those in power. Its central message is one of collective resistance, asking what happens when the pressure from below becomes impossible to ignore.
Musically, that idea is reflected in the arrangement. The contorted organ gives the track an uneasy, almost surreal quality, while Florim’s falsetto provides an unexpectedly fragile counterpoint. Rather than relying solely on the confrontational force that has characterised some of De Staat’s best-known material, the band allows the tension to accumulate before unleashing a huge, bass-driven climax. The result is a song that manages to sound both theatrical and deeply human.
The themes explored across the album will also inform an ambitious new live production, developed specifically around the DE STAAT concept.For three exclusive conceptual performances, the band have assembled a multidisciplinary creative team including director Floor Houwink ten Cate, audiovisual artist Boris Acket, lighting designer Freek Ros, visual artist Tarik Barri and audio designer Reinier Rietveld.
The collaboration promises to extend De Staat’s long-established reputation for theatrical and visually inventive live performances, with the dystopian world underpinning DE STAAT becoming a central part of the show’s aesthetic. Those conceptual performances begin with two nights at Amsterdam’s Koninklijk Theater Carré in October, before the band take the production and their new material on a wider European and UK tour.
De Staat’s reputation as a live force has been built through years of boundary-pushing performances and appearances at major festivals including Glastonbury, SXSW, Lowlands, Sziget, Boomtown, Pukkelpop and Deichbrand. They have also shared stages with artists including The Rolling Stones, Muse and Biffy Clyro.
That eclectic live history mirrors the band’s musical approach. From the hypnotic rhythms of Witch Doctor to the pointed social commentary of KITTY KITTY, De Staat have consistently used rhythm, spectacle and experimentation to create something that sits somewhere between rock concert, art installation and communal experience. DE STAAT now looks set to push that philosophy further.
The album arrives after the band’s two-year hiatus with a renewed sense of purpose, using the group’s name as both title and statement. Across its tracks, De Staat confronts a world in which political messaging, misinformation and the manipulation of public opinion have become increasingly difficult to separate from everyday life.
THE UNDERDOG provides perhaps the clearest indication yet of how that subject matter will be translated into sound: strange, muscular and confrontational, but with enough vulnerability to prevent the message from becoming one-dimensional.
With DE STAAT arriving in September and a major European and UK tour following, De Staat are returning not simply with a new record, but with a project that feels particularly suited to the uncertain times in which it has been created.
Upcoming UK & Ireland Live Dates
NOVEMBER
9th – Bristol, UK – Thekla
10th – Manchester, UK – Band on the Wall
11th – Dublin, Ireland – The Grand Social
13th – Glasgow, UK – King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut
14th – Nottingham, UK – Rescue Rooms
15th – London, UK – Scala
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