Pip Blom The Crescent, York
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For her third album, ‘Bobbie’, Dutch singer-songwriter Pip Blom decided to rip it up and start again. After making her name as one of the brightest indie rock singers around through two albums – 2019 debut ‘Boat’ and 2021 follow-up ‘Welcome Break’ – and a lauded live show honed over gruelling years of touring, the new album sees her take a delightful left turn into thumping, carefree synth pop.
While admitting to the cliché of a guitar-orientated band “grabbing the synths” for album three, this new direction had a real and genuine draw for Blom. Foremost in her mind was cult 2010s English pop band Micachu and the Shapes, led by the effervescent Mica Levi. Across four studio albums and a number of artist monikers, Levi’s band made colourful and vivacious pop music that burst outwards from a grounding in indie music. On ‘Bobbie’, Blom makes similar jumps and blows her own musical landscape wide open.
On her previous albums, Blom wrote songs on the guitar, hoping that the studio process would then allow her to live out her pop dreams through final flourishes added during the recording process. “But we were always then running out of time,” she remembers, “and they ended up as just guitar-y albums.” For ‘Bobbie’, work with synthesisers and computers began from the very beginning, and she recruited producer ​​Dave McCracken in a co-writer role to make sure the vision was fully realised.
It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Blom immediately feels utterly at home in her new clothes on ‘Bobbie’. Lead single ‘Tiger’ introduces the new sound in the catchiest, most sugary way possible via a booming synth line and a superbly catchy chorus. “It’s my favourite song off the album,” Blom says of the comeback single. “It’s quite different to what we’ve done before. I don’t want to sound arrogant, and I find these things difficult to say about my own tracks, but it’s quite an earworm! It’s good to surprise people with a new sound, and though it still sounds like a Pip Blom track because it has my voice on it and the melodies I tend to write, it’s from a different source. I wanted to be bold and do something new.”