Reviewed by Harry Cooper

Wonderfully restless and weird, with a sincerity that creeps up on you.

Ten years and three albums in, Personal Trainer have never seemed all that interested in settling into one idea of what they are. ‘Human Assholes’, the Amsterdam band's latest LP, doesn't change that, but rather the way the ideas take form. Previously, the group's songs were built from behind a laptop where the band claim attention to detail started to distract from the wider picture. This time, Willem Smit and producer Casper van der Lans started with acoustic guitar and a room full of bandmates, tracking the whole record together in six days. It's an audible payoff: the scratchy acoustic tone and worn-in piano that anchor the album feel sincere, with ideas organically developing track-by-track, even as synths, woodwind and the odd 80s flourish keep pulling the sound somewhere less predictable than 'live-tracked' usually implies.

The record's real subject, notably more than any lyrical throughline, is the space between absurdity and sincerity. It's hard to know which one to trust. After a pawnshop-sounding fanfare, ‘Scrambled Egg’ settles into a joyfully lopsided melody; Midwest emo meets honkey-tonk tavern jam. It's stranger the closer you look, with Smit's ‘Pavement’-ish lyrical instincts: deadpan, slightly deranged lines telling an odder tale than a casual listen would let on. ‘Punch Drunk Love’ pushes further into earnestness. The premise is innocently short-sighted, fixating on a stranger you’ve built a whole fantasy around. It's played straight, however, and the plodding acoustic melody and woozy strings pick up some genuine emotion where the lyric could otherwise feel ironic in the context of the album. The female backing vocals bring a folky grounding that anchors the jokes to something real.

‘Bone’ is where the album's darker, more chromatic streak shows through. Its final act swells into something close to Blur's noisier outros, against lyrics that keep circling a gravestone image while keeping its exact meaning ambiguous. It's a trick the record leans on more than once: the arrangement decides how a song should feel well before the words confirm anything. Clarity never seems to be the point, but there remains real intrigue as the songs move through creepiness and peculiarity.

The closest we get to an answer in this real-versus-surreal divide comes when Personal Trainer stop hedging altogether on the two tracks at the heart of the album. ‘The Burrows’ builds from a bare, folky opening into a rocking synth-backed guitar solo. Its lyrics burrow underground for most of the song, detailing a promise of temporary escape and a pact that survives whatever gets piled on top of it. It then surfaces in a plainer second half: a night out, a distraction, a home quietly left unattended. It's the most unguarded the album gets, even with oddball imagery. ‘Barely Guillaume’ sits in this feeling for a moment more: a bed of plain acoustic chords, nostalgic string and woodwind additions and an unshowy, ordinary vocal that suits the song better than any polish would. Neither track feels to be looking for laughs, and neither needs to be, all gimmicks are moved aside so that the sincerity the rest of the album keeps circling finally just arrives.

After that, Personal Trainer swing back towards flamboyance, and the album is purely enjoyable when they do. ‘Hole’ plays like a mock-mariachi tune just on the verge of going unwell.. It's sunny, skipping, almost tangled up in its own good mood until a metal guitar butts into the party and the vocal performance starts hinting at something less stable than the arrangement lets on. It's a lighter kind of thrill than ‘The Burrows’ or ‘Barely Guillaume’ but is a highlight of the album's live tracking; conveying all the interplay and chemistry of a band letting a song run away with itself. ‘Tempo’ and ‘Tyres Skid’ find surprising inspiration from elsewhere, trading mariachi for a shot of 80s rock. The driving guitars and synth sheen are genuinely convincing rather than a novelty, just it’s surprising when you think of the songs it reminds you of.

That same freewheeling attitude doesn’t pay off everywhere, however. A couple of the shorter interludes add little beyond a change of scenery but penultimate track ‘Object Permanence’ fares worse. It’s the heaviest, most fully-realised track for its first half, pairing gnarled acoustic guitars with genuinely expansive synths, but undercuts itself with a slowed-down outro that overstays its welcome by a couple of minutes. The other outros on the rest of the album earn their run-time with developing ideas and chemistry, but the “look at this” studio trickery in this instance is less successful.

‘Letter From The Scentless Realm’ closes the album on its most literal reckoning with the senses giving out ,taste that changes, and a numbness that creeps, all folded into a title that nods to Smit's real-life lack of smell. It is not a short song but builds candidly from a strummed electric guitar to a rich alt-rock final offering, earning every second of its 5-minute length. It’s interesting to have landed on something more conventional, and does leave the band performance as the strongest aftertaste of the album.

What's harder to pin down is what it all adds up to. 'Human Assholes' is consistently engaging, and its long runtime is mostly justified track by track. But it doesn't leave much of a thematic imprint once it's over, no single idea that lingers the way ‘The Burrows’ or ‘Barely Guillaume’ do in the moment. The same restlessness that makes the record distinctive also means it's more effectively experienced than remembered: a lot of small, vivid collisions between the ridiculous and the sincere, rarely resolved and rarely dull, but not quite adding up to one lasting statement. It's an album built to surprise you a dozen times over rather than to say one thing well, which might be exactly what a band this unwilling to sit still was always going to make.