Kids With Buns release long-awaited new album "bell jar"
Kids With Buns release their new album "bell jar" today, including the focus track of the same name. The title track 'bell jar' carries the theme that holds the entire record together. A song about clinging to the idea of a person, the fact that in theory you could work, and the boundless self-loss that comes with it. Letting yourself be treated terribly, knowing it, and allowing it to happen out of love. Sylvia Plath would understand.
The earth’s orbit can sometimes be as infuriating as it is inevitable. The sun gives just as it takes away, and perhaps the romantic soul would deem this nature’s humble trial on how to navigate the darkness.
Kids With Buns, the indie pop duo of Amber Piddington and Marie Van Uytvanck, underwent similarly maddening cycles during the making of their second LP bell jar, a reference to Sylvia Plath’s famous semi-autobiographical novel. “The theme of The Bell Jar is how every process in your life is actually circular, regarding the healing from mental health issues,” says Amber. “When things get better, they will also get worse, and at some point, that becomes a very present theme in our lives. We felt that we kept falling into certain patterns.”
Much of the album’s material was written during those spells of scrambling through the darkness. The grief of processing two simultaneous breakups vs. the joy of being two songwriters who compliment each other so very potently. It’s, in a way, its own cyclical process, one that kept two souls afloat when that larger cycle fractured.
One of the duo’s biggest growth spurts since Kids With Buns’ 2023 debut LP Out of Place has been honing a newly-hatched cinematic depth. “With this album, we just had a much clearer and stronger idea of how the songs should sound,” says Marie. “Not only arrangement-wise, but the production as well. The majority of this album materialised during writing sessions in Amber’s bedroom, right in the middle of our grieving process.”
A big catalyst in fleshing the songs out further was working with Lucy Dacus-producer Jacob Blizard, who they met at a festival in the Netherlands. After Jacob shot the duo a message to collaborate, before they knew it, Amber and Marie packed their bags to Philadelphia to record some of the demoed material with him. One of the first songs that materialised here was “The Finite”, a song that quite devastatingly captures Marie’s breakup in realtime. Right after, Marie literally stood at Amber’s front door and played the voice memo of the song to her.
“It is such a vulnerable song, but we felt so safe with Jacob to start with ‘The Finite’. I was so affected by it that we finished it first in Philly. It’s a beautiful example of our mutual trust,” Amber reflects. Turns out it is always sunny in Philadelphia, despite being huddled together in a murky basement half the time. Blizard had a collection of gear and instruments that helped Amber and Marie guide their songs to their sonic potential. And, maybe more importantly, the fortitude to power through with an infectious three-way recording process.
For the cycle of healing comes as much from revisiting one’s deepest aches as the ‘moving on’. Inevitably, many of the songs Kids With Buns wrote turned into prophecies. Olds wounds reopened, recurring patterns emerged, and reality caught up with the dream, as it so often does. The writing process was temporarily halted to deal with the recurring situations through professional counseling.
Serendipitously, the break between sessions fostered songs of unflinching introspection. Like on “I’d Be Honest”, a song where Amber candidly interrogates her own tendency to find comfort in the destruction. “This album is about heartbreak, and I felt it was very important that we didn't put ourselves in the role of victim,” Amber explains. “The fact that I found myself in harmful patterns, because I didn't know how to be alone. This is addressed in songs like "Car Crash" and "Nothing But Indigo”, which is about repeatedly relapsing into escapist behavior.”
bell jar is an album that holds an umbrella above this outpouring. It often comes down to seeing love’s potential existing within its curved shapes, and fighting for that potential to be actualised. That quest is often one beyond an individual’s control; the lovesick “Half Of A Dream” and the shrewdly-titled “Best Friends” orbit the epicenter of this painful falling out. “The whole album is about moments where love can fail,” says Marie. “All the possible things you run into, where things don't work out in love.”
Going through these volatile motions together, it mushroomed Amber and Marie’s love and appreciation for their remarkable chemistry; their innately joyous way of recouping each other’s blind spots, as well as amplifying their different strengths. It allowed Kids With Buns to fulfill the potential of the songs on bell jar, and come out stronger and wiser as people throughout its dizzying emotional journey.
Amber: “Marie’s insights made me realise that, from a cyclical standpoint, things seemed to spiral downward. And at the other side of the writing process, a different Amber and a different Marie emerged. Two people who went through the toils and showed that things can indeed turn out alright, albeit not unscathed.”
Marie: “We started out with Kids With Buns at age 18 and 20 respectively, and we were not trained musicians by any means. To be able to put that complete puzzle together; the arrangement, the songs, the production everything contributes to the whole of a song. We have had the privilege of learning it by doing it, from the bedroom to the stage. And we see the potential in each other's ideas where no one else would.”
Tracklist
1. prelude (all my bets)
2. all my bets
3. blind
4. half of a dream
5. bell jar
6. I'd be honest
7. best friend
8. nothing but indigo
9. reprise (half of a dream)
10. dizzy
11. car crash
12. devil on my shoulder
13. the finite
Kids With Buns Live dates
- 11/11 Musikbunker, Aachen DE
- 12/11 Nochtwache, Hamburg DE
- 13/11 LARK, Berlin DE
- 27/11 Gaskessel, Bern CH
- 28/11 Albani, Winterthur CH
- 02/12 LantarenVenster, Rotterdam NL
- 03/12 Doornroosje, Nijmegen NL
- 06/12 Mezz, Breda NL
- 07/12 Bitterzoet, Amsterdam NL
- 09/12 Ancienne Belgique, Brussels BE
