For Willem Smit, making a Personal Trainer album had always left plenty of room for revision: tracks assembled, edited and reconsidered on a laptop until they reached a point that temporarily qualified as finished. But after years of touring, Smit slowly began to realize that songs never really stay finished anyway. So for Human Assholes (Bella Union), the Amsterdam band’s third LP, Smit tried loosening his grip on the process.This time, many of the songs began with an acoustic guitar and were thoroughly rehearsed with the rest of the group. That immediacy carried over to the words, as the album’s speedier evolution provided less opportunity for self-censorship. The resulting 15 songs are vulnerable, funny, disorienting and deliberately difficult to pin down, taking the band’s nervy, chaotic mix of art pop and post-punk to even further extremes.
Among other revelations, MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland discovered that, a decade in, Smit is still figuring out what kind of frontman he wants to be.
Previous albums involved a lot of editing and refining, but Human Assholes was built with the band. What happened when you gave up control?
We rehearsed a lot and got most of the talking about it out of the way during that. So when we were in the studio, there was relatively little to talk about. Everyone was really focused on their parts and playing together. I was a bit wary at first, but it was one of my best studio experiences ever.
Was it about changing the sound, the songwriting or both?
It just kind of happened that way, I think. I collect a lot of songs and try to distill the skeleton for a record from my database. It turned out that most songs that started feeling like a record came from me just playing guitar instead of building layer by layer. I came to terms with the fact that I’m probably not going to like a record after a while anyway. So this time around, I was going for the first things that came up, rather than fiddling with the words too much—so maybe that makes it sound a little more vulnerable.
Living without a sense of smell is something most people can’t grasp. “Letter From A Scentless Realm” draws on your personal experience. How did it evolve into such a powerful metaphor?
Thanks for calling it powerful. I just thought about losing your senses and kind of fading away from your own POV like that—sort of like if you get crushed by a tree in a forest and no one is there to witness it or something. It’s all relatively vague to me, to be completely honest. It just made sense.
The new album’s arrangements often avoid the expected—like replacing a guitar solo with woodwinds on “Object Permanence.”
I made a demo version of the record before taking it to the band. The flute bit in “Object Permanence” was something we came up with for this part in the song. We liked the idea of recording the flutes all together at the same time because it was a nice challenge. Plus, I wanted something that was slightly out of tune, which worked really well that way. I do tend to subconsciously veer away from one particular vibe when it gets too flat. In this case, it sounded a bit grungy and “muscular” to me, so it felt right to add something that sounded a bit lighter and off. I like to make a song that goes in multiple directions sometimes.
You’ve always been a reluctant frontman. After 10 years with Personal Trainer, how has your relationship with that role changed?
In the first years of Personal Trainer, I grew into this over-the-top role of being a chubby guy throwing himself around the stage and getting into this embarrassment-free, not-too-heady-or-conscious zone. I’ve found it harder to keep that up, as I keep floating up out of my body and looking down at this guy acting out this theatrical bit. I started to feel a bit silly—it started to feel fake. Now I’m looking for a new way to do my thing that doesn’t feel too forced. This is a long, continuous process—not something that changed with this record per se.
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