Personal Trainer share new single and video 'Moping'

Commenting on “Moping” Willem Smit says: “To me, Moping is mostly about being a musician and getting stuck inside your own loop a little bit. The song keeps circling back on itself lyrically and musically. The chorus uses this Pixies trick of looping three bars of 4/4 instead of four, so the loop never fully settles. It creates this automatic forward motion that feels exciting to me without sounding too ‘look how clever this is.’ That looping feeling is reinforced by all the self-reference in the lyrics too - almost like a kind of navel-gazing meta glitch. I was listening to a lot of Callahan & Witscher, as well as They Might Be Giants - they influenced the song pretty directly.” Additionally, Personal Trainer have announced news of more UK headline shows, in Portsmouth and Cambridge, as well as festival appearances at SWN and Future Days. All live dates are listed below: Personal Trainer UK & EU live dates: 27th June - Utrecht, EKKO (NL) 17th July - Knokke-Heist, Kneistival (BE) 25th July - Balen, Rock Olmen (BE) 27th-30th August - Into The Great Wide Open (NL) 12th September - Merksplas, Backyard Festival, (BE) 18th September - Amsterdam, Carre (NL) 7th October - Bonn, Rockpalast Festival (DE) 9th October - Nürnberg Pop, Nürnberg Pop (DE) 16th October - Cardiff, SWN (UK) 17th October - Birmingham, Future Days (UK) 18th October - Portsmouth, Kola (UK) 20th October - London, Scala (UK) 22nd October - Manchester, Band on the Wall (UK) 23rd October - St Davids, Boia Festival (UK) 24th October - Bristol, Thekla (UK) 25th October - Cambridge, Portland Arms (UK) 27th October - Bruges, Cactus Club (BE) 28th October - Antwerp, Trix (BE) 29th October - Hasselt, Club AFF (BE) 13th November - Weissenhäuser Strand, Rolling Stone Beach (DE) 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 UK label Bella Union. On the artwork for Personal Trainer’s third album Human Assholes 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”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Smit being born without a sense of smell. 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. 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.” “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.”