A truly transatlantic prospect, Max Blansjaar was born in Amsterdam, moved to Oxford at a young age, and for the making of his debut album, False Comforts headed to Brooklyn, because who wouldn’t want to make a record in Brooklyn? While it was his debut long-player, Max has actually been active around the Oxford scene since 2018, when a then 15-year-old Max started promoting his own shows and performing his, “playfully sincere lo-fi indie pop songs”, and releasing cassette EPs via Beanie Tapes. It was with an ambition for something more that Max headed to Brooklyn, and spent two weeks with producer, and acclaimed solo artist in her own right, Katie Von Schleicher at her Prospect Park studio. There alongside Market’s Nate Mendelsohn, they brought Max’s demos to life, expanding the sonic horizons of their intricate beginnings into songs that seem to exist somewhere in the ether between all the places that shaped them.

False Comforts is a record that seems to exist at a point in Max’s life that we can surely all relate to, written in the early 2020s it finds Max questioning just who he is, where he fits into the so-called Gen-Z and why the new found freedom of finishing school and going out into the world, conversely to him was, “feeling somehow like less freedom than I’d ever had before”. The result is a record that kicks against the listlessness of his reality, Max decided the only way to find a place in the world, was to make one entirely of his own creation, explaining who he is and where he fits, or at least, “reflected the powerlessness of not knowing my place”.

Max’s record sounds as vast as the influences he thanks in the liner notes, the “harmonic simplicity” of The Velvet Underground and Elephant 6, the playful lyricism of Cate Le Bon and Beck and the bravery to be, “bolder in my choice of sounds”, that he picked up playing in various experimental projects along the way. From the gorgeous Elvis Depressedly-like slowcore of On Beyond Eden to the funk-influenced lo-fi of Song Against Love, throughout False Comforts Max is unafraid to push new buttons without ever forgetting where these songs started life. Perhaps best of all was the Alex-G-like recent single, Burning In Our Name, a rare attempt at getting political, that’s still distinctly personal and all the more intriguing as a result.

With the record out now and a string of UK tour dates celebrating the occasion, today Max talks us through the tracks on False Comforts, sharing the influences, ideas and back stories of the songs that make up this most stunning of debut albums.

Saturnia

Man, this song was such a nightmare. Pretty much at every stage. Writing it took ages. I sat on the floor for hours with the bass loop playing, and I wrote about seven verses, in the end I only ended up using three of them. Then recording it was difficult because we couldn’t figure out how to make the choruses pop, since the chords are the same as in the verses and the melody is pretty similar, too. And then it was the hardest song to mix, because there’s so much going on, and so much mid-range stuff, that it was really tricky to stop it sounding muddy. We got there in the end! Goes to show, sometimes you’ve got to put the work in, I suppose.

Burning in our Name

I don’t like writing songs ‘about’ politics. It’s so easy to descend into moralising, or oversimplify, or be obvious, and I feel like I’m just not that good at it. But ‘Burning in our Name’ is a song where I kind of gave it a go. It’s still through this personal lens, though, of course, which is kind of the point. I worry about the eyesores, and the spaceships, but I also worry about spiders.

Anna Madonna

I sort of had a feeling this would be the lead single even before we started recording the album. It always felt like the poppiest one. I wrote the lyrics on a post-it note one day, and didn’t write the melody until after, but it felt like it emerged naturally. Recording it was such a breeze, it felt like all the creative decisions were sort of obvious. Not in a bad way, just — everything seemed like it slotted into place by itself.

Like a Bad Dream

A song from my first year of university, and probably the one I’m most proud of lyrically. I remember waking up one morning and this melody being stuck in my head, and I immediately wrote the lyrics to it, also in my head, while I was getting ready to go out. I lock the door and step into the shower…in my head it was really lethargic and slow, like something off Beck’s One Foot in the Grave or something, also because it’s kind of apocalyptic that way. But it got quicker and quicker and now it’s pretty chirpy. Until the end.

I was worried the ending would sound too similar to something by the Velvet Underground but actually it’s okay. Also, incidentally, I think you can prove the Velvets are the best band in the world because when someone rips off another band, you’re like: ugh, what a rip-off. But when someone rips off the Velvets, you’re like: wow, this is the new best band in the world.

Song Against Love

This is one of the songs that changed completely once we took it into the studio. Initially it was a pretty straightforward four-on-the-floor song, kind of Gorillaz-adjacent, with a really loud chorus. Then Nate listened to the demo one morning while Katie was out, and he was like: what if we started with the bassline, without the beat, and put all these weird stops in it? Then it all got weirder from there. Brian Betancourt kindly came in and played bass on this one, because we wanted the bass to do something that was too complicated for any of us to be able to play. He’s a magician.

Red Tiger

I wrote this song when I was sixteen — it’s one of the oldest songs on the album. I nearly cut it before we went to New York to record, but I’m glad I didn’t. Sometimes it takes outside input to change your perspective on a song and make you love it again. The line it’s a jungle / and words have never won our survival / however hard they’re sung kind of sums up the whole album, in some ways. For the nerds and the losers: the piano section at the end is a fugal exposition, but it’s wrong, because the third entry comes in at the same pitch as the second entry. If you even care.

Life on Earth

A fun one. The feeling of being young and invincible is kind of a cliché, and I don’t think that feeling is usually so simple, but sometimes you come close to glimpsing it, with all the thrill and the fear and the danger it involves. People / sleeping in and dreaming / of lives they could’ve had / if they’d woken up on time is an adapted version of a line in basically one of the first songs I ever wrote, when I was about fourteen. Clearly I have a thing about sleeping in. I’ve been sleeping in more recently, and it always makes me feel really bad. Probably I should address that.

On Beyond Eden

This is another song that went through a lot of different versions before arriving here. It was a kind of Oasis-esque ballad at one point, then it was something really stripped back on just piano, and then we ended up doing it this way. Something I find hard about songwriting is feeling paralysed by possibility, feeling like I can do whatever I want, and having to restrain myself on the one hand but also commit to my choices on the other. Something Nate said which I think was sensible, is he was like: sometimes it’s okay that people don’t get to hear everything a song could’ve been. You give them one version of it, but of course it could’ve ended up as a million different things, and they won’t like the song less because it’s not something else that it could’ve been.

Pieces of the Sun

I think we really nailed the production on this one. I’m glad Katie and Nate convinced me to leave the vocals and the guitar sounds fairly clean — because of course I wanted everything to be run through a guitar amp and a bunch of pedals to sound really crunchy. But actually, I think it sounds deeper when it’s polished like this. I also love Nate’s saxophone playing in the outro. To those who say a saxophone play-out is cheesy, I say: no, or okay, sometimes yes, but not this time. It’s a shame because ‘Careless Whisper’ is, I think, a genuinely beautiful song, but it’s just been ruined by being memed all the time to the point where people can’t take it seriously anymore. The saxophone solo has suffered the same fate alongside it.

I Will Not Be Forgiven

Mission statement. I think it’s clear that a lot of my songs are written from a kind of exaggerated, imagined perspective, and I don’t necessarily believe everything I sing here or anywhere. But it’s a kind of escapism, to just perform defiance in the face of everything, even though you don’t necessarily feel that way in real life. Keep saying it and it becomes true, maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

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False Comforts is out now via Beanie Tapes. For more information on Max Blansjaar visit https://linktr.ee/maxblansjaar.