For her third album, “Bobbie”, Dutch singer-songwriter Pip Blom decided to rip it up and start again. After making her name as one of the brightest indie rock singers around through two albums – 2019 debut “Boat” and 2021 follow-up “Welcome Break” – and a lauded live show honed over gruelling years of touring, the new album sees her take a delightful left turn into thumping, carefree synth pop.
While admitting to the cliché of a guitar-orientated band “grabbing the synths” for album three, this new direction had a real and genuine draw for Blom and foremost in her mind was cult 2010s English pop band Micachu and the Shapes. For their previous albums,
Blom wrote songs on the guitar, hoping that the studio process would then allow her to live out her pop dreams through final flourishes added during the recording process. “But we were always then running out of time,” she remembers, “and they ended up as just guitar-y albums.” For “Bobbie”, work with synthesisers and computers began from the very beginning, and she recruited producer Dave McCracken in a co-writer role to make sure the vision was fully realised.
To immerse herself in this new way of working, Blom worked on the album in separate, intensive bursts of creativity, based around a series of non-stop five-day studio jaunts in her native Netherlands. The songs were then sent to McCraken – whose credits include Jay-Z and Kanye West – to gain a little more “clarity” and be trimmed into the tight, punchy pop hits that make up the new album
Pip Blom shared ‘Get Back’, the track taken from their forthcoming third album, “Bobbie”, which is out this month! The single follows high profile collaborations with Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand on ‘This Is Love?’ and Dutch indie act Personal Trainer on ‘Kiss Me By The Candlelight.’
Talking about the track, Pip said: “One of the things I am most happy with on this album is the vocal sound. My voice sounds warm and intimate, but also punchy and fierce at other times. During the recording of the vocals in the chorus, we laughed a lot because it turned out to be quite difficult to say “Get Back” so many times in a row. I love how “Get Back” is both a rock song but still sounds very produced. A recurring phenomenon on “Bobbie” is the vocals with a lot of autotune, which can also be heard in the bridge of this song. “Get Back” may be one of the loudest songs on the album, yet Claudius managed to give it an even bigger lift in volume and intensity in the last chorus.
This 12-track collection features collaborations with Personal Trainer and Alex Kapranos.
Release Date: 20/10/2023
The Fat Angel Sings 