The Klittens - Have A Heart Review
After the EPs Citrus and Butter, The Klittens return with a debut album that draws on the spirit of bands like The Raincoats while making room for five distinct voices.
Have a Heart is charmingly disarming from the off, the kind of album that pulls you in with its first track. Its bouncy chorus, searing riffs and screams into the void give an immediately likeable pop song a darker edge. You can hear something of The Raincoats, The Ronettes and Kate Bush in The Klittens’ approach, alongside touches of MF DOOM and Dry Cleaning, but the Amsterdam five-piece have enough of their own character to make those influences feel like starting points.
The album is vibrant, off-kilter and unpredictable, switching between brash hooks and slower indie pop. ‘Have a Heart’ opens with an abrasive call for compassion, asking why we remain ‘stuck on the violent part’. ‘Taxi’, meanwhile, has a Magnetic Fields-tinged sense of nostalgia, but its whimsy conceals something more vulnerable. ‘I am a weakling, and I’m only getting weaker’, Yaël Dekker sings, before admitting, ‘Don’t need anybody… until I do.’ The song catches that uncomfortable point where keeping secrets and insisting you’re fine can leave you feeling less whole. Laurie Zantinge’s drums give those admissions an extra push, while Dekker moves between wit and seriousness without making either feel out of place.
‘Zelda’ slows things down further, looking at life through the ages of ‘thirty, seventeen and nine’ and the strange way we can still feel like all our former selves at once. After the guardedness of ‘Taxi’, it sounds rawer and more open. The clapping gives the song a communal feel, inviting other voices into what begins as a private thought, while Dekker’s vocal circles over its hypnotic beat.
Elsewhere, the punchy ‘Triple Threat’ shows how much ground the band can cover in a short space of time, and ‘Bank Account’ uses humour to get at the awkward ways people measure themselves and one another through money. Dekker’s delivery makes the most of both songs, though the record’s range belongs to the group as a whole. Zantinge, guitarists Winnie Conradi and Katja Kahana, and bassist Marrit Meinema each bring something different to the music, giving it the feeling of five people working through an idea together.
Have a Heart isn’t polished, but its rough edges suit a band moving between alt-folk, indie pop and lo-fi post-punk. The songs are energetic and lively even when they’re world-weary. Feelings of powerlessness run through the record in several forms, from private insecurity to the circumstances that shape where and how people live. The question is what you do with them.
That tension comes through most clearly on ‘Their House’, which addresses unaffordable rents and the feeling of being cramped in somebody else’s space. ‘Blue Hue: A Short Plea’ allows the band to be more earnest amid the witticisms, while ‘Nothing to Teach’ delivers its point through deadpan humour and jangling guitars. It takes aim at people who think they know everything. We know you don’t, so why not listen to someone else for a change? By the closing ‘The Frame: A Short Complaint’, the cheerfully unbothered attitude heard earlier in the album begins to sound like a form of self-defence.
Have a Heart is so easy to listen to that it can be easy to miss the craft holding its ramshackle parts together. Its title track soars through the chaotic details of life, and the album gives The Klittens plenty of room to be funny, anxious, abrasive and tender, sometimes within the same song. It’s one of late September’s most enjoyable releases from one of the Netherlands’ most interesting indie bands.