158. The music round

I.

On the cover of his new album Trying Times, James Blake is trying to keep plates spinning in the air. In a conducting pose, as if trying to give himself some direction. “The perfect representation of my past few years”, he says in an interview with Zane Lowe. “If you don’t keep spinning the plates, they fall and break on the ground. I was doing far too much.”

Fair enough. Blake built his own online platform, giving fans early access to his new music. He left his label and started managing himself. He produced music for others, spent time with his girlfriend and dog, and moved from Los Angeles to London. Oh yes, and the whole world was (and is) on fire.

What happened? “I don’t know how we got here”, Blake sings on Death of Love. “Everything feels different / People are losing interest.” And on the tear-jerking closer Just A Little Higher, the lyrics read: “Everyone’s getting different information / So how can we get on the same side?”

If you boil it right down, says Blake, the album is about love in chaos. Like everyone else, he watched society polarise over recent years. That is partly down to social media. “The internet became a nasty place”, he says. “Have you ever had a conversation in real life the way people talk online? In real life, people don’t talk like that. But the algorithm promotes a state of constant outrage, so online you get that.”

I Had a Dream She Took My Hand sounds as if it was recorded in the Bang Bang Bar from Twin Peaks. And on the title track Trying Times, Blake is at his very best. Another highlight: Doesn’t Just Happen, on which Dave steals the show (and namedrops Tony Soprano).

James Blake on Trying Times is the sad James Blake. There is not much to laugh at, and yet (or because of it) it is a beautiful album. He doesn’t need to make things prettier than they are, despite the ironic album title. Trying times, eh mate?

II.

Gorillaz was a magical band in my youth. On MTV and TMF I eagerly watched for the music videos of Clint Eastwood and 19-2000. The virtual style of Jamie Hewlett and the voice of Damon Albarn have remained a wonderful combination.

When Demon Days came out, I listened to nothing else for weeks. The journey from dark to light, the introduction to De La Soul and MF Doom. The album landed right in the sweet spot between my love for britpop and hip hop.

Gorillaz make their best albums with a strong concept as a starting point. That was true of Demon Days and later of Plastic Beach as well. After that the music more often felt like loose sand and the band gradually lost me. But sixteen years later, The Mountain grips me again.

The album feels like a spiritual journey and an ode to the dead. Deceased friends such as Proof, Mark E. Smith, Bobby Womack and Trugoy the Dove can be heard. Albarn and Hewlett both lost their fathers not long ago. “We were born ten days apart”, says Albarn. “And our fathers died ten days apart… I think it’s just the nature of the universe.”

The two men travelled to India and let the country inspire them for the new album. Albarn scattered his father’s ashes in the Ganges. “My father loved Indian culture — in terms of philosophy and culture — and I grew up with classical Indian music”, he says. That knowledge alone makes the album special.

Not that it is a mournful album, mind you — the tracks sound uplifting. The best way to experience it is to listen to everything back to back. Turn your phone off for an hour, sit on a comfortable sofa with a cup of coffee and lose yourself in the musical narrative of The Mountain, says Jamie Hewlett. “It’s an experience. A journey.”

III.

On his previous album Hemellichamen, Lucky Fonz III sang about a depression that plagued him after his relationship ended. It brought him the most beautiful song he has written to date: Kwantumwetenschapper. On it he sings: “So you cut yourself into pieces, you reshape yourself / into a shapeless mass / so that you come back again / and are poured once more / into a new society / and in the emptiness between strangers / you belong again.”

The singer is doing better now. His new album De zachte krachten is about searching for (and finding) new happiness. On Iedereen, Lucky Fonz III sings about this directly, staring into a void. “And then I just hope that someone stares back at me / and says: that void, that’s the beginning.”

The word ‘motherland’ recurs in several songs. Lucky Fonz III is looking for a home base, for “love and a kind of peace.” You can find that at the bar, you hear on Geluk is een ober. “Happiness is a bartender, barperson, or bar-X / who knows everything about you / on the basis of almost nothing / who already knew when you walked in / what you wanted to drink / while you were still asking yourself / what should I do with this life / what should I do now?”

On the quieter tracks, Lucky finds the most room for introspection. Those songs are interspersed with gabber-house, on which he also has things to say, though often in a slightly more cringeworthy way. What are we supposed to do with a track like Paarden? Sometimes it works better — on Intergeneratie, for instance.

Het waait een klein beetje is a highlight on the record, in which he plays with the idea of walking into the sea and just letting himself be carried away. Pluto is another lovely track, with lines like: “And as a body cell renews itself / every seven years / then nothing of what I am now / was ever even there.”

Lucky Fonz III ends happily on the album. He has found love again. In bed met jou is an extraordinary song, too sweet for words. It turns out I do have a soft spot for swooning love songs.

PS.

YouTuber Ella Aafjes made a very fun and creative video about digital detoxing.

Former NRC editor-in-chief Peter Vandermeersch made a scandalous blunder with AI. In his articles about journalism for publisher Mediahuis, he inserted dozens of quotes attributed to real experts who had never said them. Vandermeersch allowed himself to be seduced into passing off AI hallucinations as truth. A cardinal sin and damaging to the journalistic profession.¹

For about a year and a half now I have been receiving warnings that deepfakes could be used to open bank accounts in the names of unsuspecting people — to launder money or place orders on someone else’s behalf. Bad news. Banks claim to be taking countermeasures, but it is still simple to bypass them. This week, in an Amsterdam court, I finally saw evidence: this is possible and it is really happening.

Like everyone else I watched Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere on Netflix and like everyone else it wound me up.

I was at Geese in Paradiso (it was fantastic). What struck me: young people photographing not with a new iPhone, but with disposable cameras, tiny toy cameras, dumbphones and — I am not joking — a Nintendo 3DS.

There is a trailer for the next Spider-Man film. And it is already packed with cameos from well-known characters from Marvel’s comic, series and film franchises. Looking forward to it.

3voor12 follows Abel van Gijlswijk and Yousef Gnaoui in the lead-up to their show at Paradiso for IJSLAND 2 (which I attended). Including footage from the show.

You just read blog №158, written in the week of 16 to 22 March 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and receive it in your inbox every Sunday for free.