Cheeky and rebellious, the Netherlands’ own brand of ‘ludiek’ zaniness thrived in the 1960s protest era. Now, the New Dutch Naivety movement is bringing it back with songs about chocolate, good transport and no-smoking policies
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magine a song about the noisy centre of Amsterdam turning magically into chocolate, prompting children to go wild and eat it. The edifice then melts away, once you get the train from Amsterdam Lelylaan to Haarlemmermeer. This is the story of Amsterdam is opeens van chocolade (“Amsterdam is suddenly chocolate”), a song written by the young alt-pop musician, Thor Kissing. It is an example of a cheeky and rebellious aspect of 20th-century Dutch popular culture, ludiek (“playfulness”), which may be on the rise again.
Kissing is a central figure in a new project that tries to capture what ludiek music means in the 21st century: two compilation albums called Nieuwe Nederlandse Naïviteit (“New Dutch Naivety”), promoting a disparate bunch of contemporary alternative Dutch-language pop artists. In October 2024, the first volume was launched in a spartan youth centre in an out-of-the-way Zaandam suburb. Volume two is set for release this March, in “hip” Amsterdam.
The music on both compilations varies wildly: from glitchy electro pop to 90s alt-rock and doomy, Cure-like postpunk. Flemish voice artist Lila Maria de Coninck took part at the 2024 launch and performs on the latest compilation as part of the duo Welnu. She loves the “playfulness and the imagination” of the music that is “sometimes not well thought through”, but “challenging how music and language should sound, and function”. De Coninck cites artists including Niek Hilkmann, Miriam Hochberg and Joris Anne, who create colourful autodidact worlds on pop’s margins.
