Knarsetand (NL)

Knarsetand smashes the reset button and is back with a new raw sound, a new band, an energy like never before and one message: Welcome to the Mad House. The band’s seven musicians deliver a thunderous sound full of breakbeat, electronica and garagepunk, infused with balkan, and cumbia. Like in a lucid nightmare, Knarsetand drags their listeners through the halls of their insane asylum, past rooms full of intense, raw, unruly, and hypnotising impressions. With sharp lyrics, psychedelic soundscapes, tempting brass, fierce guitar riffs, aggressive synths, entrancing, beats, and heavy basslines, the Knarsetand-machine transforms every place they go into a pit of fuming energy. Knarsetand performed over 100 times in two years with its previous formation. From the small studio of the biggest radio station in The Netherlands, to main stages on large festivals. After the sunny days of festivals, Martijn Holtslag, who’s the composer, producer, and bandleader, crawled back into the darkness of his studio, and membrane. Disillusioned from the notion of a malleable world, disappointed in demagogic politicians, sleepless nights, a broken heart, a depression, litres of escapism, and a good dose of reality checks made Holtslag give a musical outlet to the anxious, itching, and grating feeling of agitation in his stomach. Besides writing the music, Martijn felt the urge to make his lyrics more personal and perform them live as a vocalist. A type of therapy. Tempered to spread his rebellious madness and escapism, a new band got together, to revive Knarsetand and fight the delusion of daily life. The new Knarsetand sounds like the result of a studio session of a Rage Against The Machine guitarist having a bad trip, combined with a manic producer from The Prodigy, Pendulum on painkillers, and all of that performed live by some sort of freaked out Mexican garage punk band with two multi-instrumentalist brass addicts.