• News

• All

Jun 13, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Siobhan Cox

Although he is only 21, Oxford-based indie singer/songwriter Max Blansjaar has been crafting his style of playful lo-fi indie pop for years. He debuted in 2018 with his laptop-recorded EP, Spit It Out!, and followed with his similarly DIY sophomore EP, Fantasy Living in 2019. After a five-year hiatus, Blansjaar returned with a series of new singles earlier this year, teasing his debut album, False Comforts.

Blansjaar recorded False Comforts in Brooklyn with Katie Von Schleicher producing. The full album is out next week on June 21st, but ahead of the release, Blansjaar is sharing a final single from the album, “Saturnia,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Each of the singles on False Comforts have seen Blansjaar going in new directions, whether with the breezy and charming “Anna Madonna” or the textured psychedelia of “Red Tiger.” Blansjaar remains similarly restless on “Saturnia,” the opening track of False Comforts. The track crafts an intoxicating groove with watery bass lines, alluring rhythms, and Blansjaar’s simmering vocal melody. Yet, Blansjaar also brings a dynamic sense of progression as the track winds onward. He dresses the hook with a warm chorus of group vocals, takes a turn into a frenzied spoken-word bridge, and pulls back for a dreamy lo-fi piano interlude near the track’s end. Ultimately, “Saturnia” gives the sense that Blansjaar’s songwriting has evolved dramatically over the past few years, both becoming more ambitious and retaining an undeniably infectious element.

Blansjaar explains,

“I started writing the first False Comforts songs in early 2020. It felt like a lot of talk happening around me was generational—the news covered generational challenges, my friends professed generational anxieties over Web 2.0, table service, and global crises they did not cause, I gave in and read Spotify’s apocalyptic Who is Gen Z, Really? report in the search for self-knowledge—yet I struggled to ever identify with that category, which always struck me as more of a buzzphrase than as a genuine connection. At the same time, I was at the threshold of what was, for me, a new world: just finishing school, between two states of being, all the freedom in the universe suddenly feeling somehow like less freedom that I’d ever had before. I felt the need to assert myself, to make music that reflected where I actually fit into the world of rituals and allegiances that was unfolding around me. Or, at least, that reflected the powerlessness of not knowing my place.

I challenged myself to get straightforward. Stop chasing complexity and Follow Your Nose! Amongst others, I owe a debt of gratitude to The Velvet Underground and to Elephant 6 for teaching me the power of the harmonically simple, to Beck and to Cate Le Bon for lyrical inspiration, and to a couple of experimental music groups I started playing with that got me to be bolder in my choice of sounds. It all made sense, finally, partway through our two weeks of recording the album. I came across Brad Liening’s poetry collection Are You There, God? It’s Me, Whitney Houston at a bookshop in Dumbo one day (one of the last copies out there, he’s since told me), and when I opened it, there was the line: some explanations / last forever and never / answer a thing. Yahtzee! There doesn’t always have to be a solution, or a resolution; it can be rewarding, even necessary, to linger in a snapshot of a feeling for a while. In that sense, I knew these songs would be False Comforts. They wouldn’t fix anything, they wouldn’t give me answers, they wouldn’t help, they were pointless, unproductive hideouts, explanations lasting forever. And I found a strange comfort in them for that. Maybe someone else will, too.”

Check out the song below. False Comforts is out everywhere on June 21st. Pre-order the track here.