There’s this funny Dutch phrase that goes “mijn ei kwijt kunnen”, which quite clumsily translates to “unloading my egg”; it more or less means having an environment or activity where all your feelings, creativity and energy can unshackle as you see fit. For the past 10 years, Willem Smit’s eggs found their baskets within Personal Trainer, the restlessly creative Dutch indie rock stalwarts who have gradually risen up from Amsterdam’s grassroots scenes to touring the world as part of the roster of distinguished record label Bella Union.

On the artwork for Personal Trainer’s third album Human Assholes – out September 4th – Smit paints a character pulling off the rather buffoonish act of balancing an egg on a spoon between his teeth behind a blindfold, imagery lifted quite literally from the album’s closing track “Letter from a Scentless Realm”. 

But there’s a quiet desperation simmering beneath all the foolish fun: Smit has been ever reluctant as the quote unquote frontman of a band that keeps evolving and changing around him. During the writing and recording process of previous albums Big Love Blanket and follow-up Still Willing, Smit and his creative compadre, producer Casper van der Lans, often found themselves transfixed on minute details behind their laptops, thinking out loud whether they have lost the plot concerning the bigger picture. 

“There is a method somewhere in there that I still don’t fully see through myself,” Smit says of his band’s paradoxical fine-tuning process. “And as soon as I do, I often go back to doing something else. There is always a lot of cutting and refining involved.” “Letter from a Scentless Realm” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Smit being born without a sense of smell, something his parents initially deemed a joke before they went to a hospital to make sure it was true. 

Being part of a lifestyle where you have to travel long distances inside a van with everyone’s dirty laundry, one could say Smit was built for it. “On ‘Letter from a Scentless Realm’ I picture a kind of thing, where someone’s senses slowly fail until the person is no longer there” states Smit. “At the end, there is the suggestion that someone plays a song for years, and every now and then a string breaks, until at some point they are all broken.”

On Human Assholes, Smit chooses to be less gullible in letting his own (working) senses be the guiding force. On the melancholy club track “Tyres Skid”, the narrator has the feeling that the world is no longer quite right/complete since they made the choice to leave the past behind. In reality, roughly the same stars are still visible, and the guitar and the car probably work fine, but in the narrator’s eyes/hands, they no longer do.

One of the bigger decisions for Human Assholes was to make the acoustic guitar the starting point. And even more importantly, pen the songs in a physical room with the rest of the band instead of cutting and pasting stuff behind a screen. “Every take that a group of people does simultaneously is a moment that has just happened and is shared by a group of people: if accidents happen, or if things do or do not go off the rails, that is part of what is happening in that performance. You give up some control, but for me, the decision-making became that much easier.”

Three years of non-stop touring brought Personal Trainer to a freeing realization:  no song is ever final, and no show is ever the last. “I think this is where a large part of the band’s spirit comes from. We don’t have to handle things with kid gloves, we don’t have to frantically search for our sound. As a result, the show was always, in a sense, both a performance and a rehearsal for the next show. Now we were going to practice a lot with the group to record that album all together in six days. In this process, we actually did a more precise/focused version of how we normally prepare new songs for a performance. I was very impressed by everyone’s skill and focus.”

The warmer, more organic recording methods translated into the congenial alt-country leanings of “Scrambled Egg” and lead single “Punch Drunk Love”, with Smit leaning more zealously into his illusory, effortlessly charming songwriting. “Punch Drunk Love reminds me of a very strong feeling of being in love, and causing someone to behave problematically. There is obsession and psychosis in it, justified by a beautiful feeling. The band is joined on this song by Susanne Linssen of Hospital Bombers, one of my favourite Dutch bands, and (ex-member) Franti Maresova.”

“Just because it’s common sense/Doesn’t mean it sits right with me”, he intones on “Object Permanence”, the kind of frayed indie rock anthem that normally would climax with some kind of scorching guitar solo. But Personal Trainer instead opted for an alleviating woodwind harmony performed by Smit, Ruben van Weegberg (bass), Mart Boumans (guitar/sax), and Abel Tuinstra (keys/synths), giving ‘common sense’ the proverbial runaround. 

Human Assholes offers plenty of moments where Personal Trainer court silly what if’s with their signature kamikaze spirit. Like on “Hole”, which sounds like Dirty Projectors covering a mariachi band. The title track, meanwhile, finds the band guiding the narrator’s nagging pessimism upstream like a benevolent tide, as a persistent sax drone trills on like a soothing siren’s call. “That approach was possible because I could rely on the skills of my bandmates and Casper’s ears. The recording process was actually easy, and I think it sounds better than the previous records. I have the feeling that this is a real studio album, featuring a few of my favourite musicians in the Netherlands, who also happen to be my friends.”

Turns out the phrase “wake up and smell the roses” also applies to those wholly unfamiliar with scent. “I have always looked at the role of music in my life with great enthusiasm,” Smit concludes. “But also in a quite down-to-earth way. It is my greatest passion, but it is also just music, and that is precisely why it is important to me. It is a kind of sandbox I can sit in whenever I want. I have always been able to express myself through it as an outlet, but never was it as evident to me as during this process. It really felt like a ‘safe haven’ to sink my teeth into for days, while everything else wasn’t going so well.”