The Klittens - Have A Heart (2026) [Hi-Res]

The Klittens sound like a gang. Not only when they're sneering a sing-songy schoolyard chant like "you have nothing/ nothing to teach me/ you have nothing to teach!"—but also when, elsewhere, their soft, girl-group vocal harmonies trail over one another. Throughout the Netherlands band's exceptional, us-against-the-world debut album, the individual contributions of all five players are clear as day. Lead vocalist Yaël Dekker enunciates like a cross between Valerie Trebeljahr of Lali Puna, Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins, and David Byrne doing his "Once in a Lifetime" sermon schtick—see the striking spoken-word outro to "Fool Me Once" for her most candid runaway tongue. When she sings a line like "Don't need anybody… until I do" on the sweet-but-broken "Taxi," you realize she's subverting defiant declarations with these earnest admissions underneath. "I'm underwater and it gets to me" is another one, but it only comes during the final bars of "Triple Threat."

The instrumentation is the same way: honest, unvarnished. You can hear every note played by the band's three string wranglers. Bassist Marrit Meinema's pokey, leading-the-way lines contrast guitar one's clean, clunky jabs and guitar two's shy, spacious curiosity. The tangle recalls how a fellow young band of zine-makers and D.I.Y. devotees—Horsegirl—approached their sophomore album, Phonetics On and On, as well as no-distortion minimalists such as Patio. Like those peers, the Klittens never resort to imprecise fuzz walls. Instead, they follow each other intently, carefully. They're figuring it out as they go but in a telepathic interplay of Sleater-Kinney way, or like the unselfconscious rawness of Daniel Johnston, or even the pioneering primitivism way of the Raincoats. On "Interlude I," it's like they're trying to underscore a cartoon spider making its way up a drainpipe without agreeing on anything beforehand. On the bouncy, joyful "Nothing To Teach," the band makes beneficial naivete and garage-banding sound totally invincible. It might be the best chorus of the year let alone on the album.

With the title, Have A Heart, they're speaking to a lyrical throughline of feeling powerless and wanting to catch a goddamn break—imagine saying it with rolled eyes to a combover boss—but it doubles as a reference to the inimitable magic at the band's core. The Klittens have a heart. There's a great deal of it here. Only friends who love making stuff together could end up with a record that sounds this way: fresh, from-the-hip, full of life. © Hayden Merrick/Qobuz