Personal Trainer will release their new album Human Assholes on September 4th via Bella Union. The LP is the follow-up to the band’s 2024 album Still Willing. Ahead of the arrival of Human Assholes, Personal Trainer have shared the single “Moping,” accompanied by a video directed by and starring Personal Trainer frontman Willem Smit. “The song keeps circling back on itself lyrically and musically,” explains frontman and songwriter Willem Smit. “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-gazy meta glitch. I was listening to a lot of Callahan & Witscher, as well as They Might Be Giants – they influenced the song pretty directly.”

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.

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. 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. It is the magic of a shared creative experience, including the accidents and breakthroughs along the way, that bring Human Assholes to life.

Pre-order Human Assholes to life by Personal Trainer HERE