On the Rise
Grote Geelstaart

Okay, okay, maybe the last one isn’t made up. But when it comes to Mother Oceania, the lines between fiction and reality tend to blur more easily than most. From an evolutionary standpoint, I suppose, it is stranger than fiction that a fish flopping ashore would evolve millions of years into bipedal creatures that would invent things like cotton candy, opera, and the Dutch Delta Works, the intricate network of dykes, barriers, and levees keeping the agitated North Sea at bay.

This miracle of human science is trying to stave off unrelenting natural force for as long as humanly possible – despair and defiance squaring up an inevitable doom. A skirmish worthy of blockbuster pay-per-view TV or folk songs passed down through generations. Grote Geelstaart’s flummoxing take on prog, noise, and post-rock seems to capture both the immensity and absurdity of this same spectrum. Witnessing this young Dutch dynamo perform repeatedly sparks the question “Are bands, generally speaking, getting better and better?” 

Maybe things just aren’t supposed to be simple anymore. Back in the day, what constituted a band was a relatively straightforward calculus. You had studious cool cats who could really play and mingle with other cool scene dwellers within the concrete folds of the big city. At the same time, somewhere in the periphery, a flock of weirdos conjure their own noisy playbook in some barren basement, insular and aloof from musical trends.

Grote Geelstaart appears to be a particularly uncanny agglutination of these two tropes. The five-piece band is firmly based in, and informed by, the pastoral scenery of Kapelle, a sleepy mainland town in the coastal province of Zeeland. Yet simultaneously, they grew up entrenched in the information age, comfortably accumulating the nitty gritty behind each productional trick, mic placement, and musical chop with a simple click of the mouse. 

“You can spend ages just messing around on your own,” says synth and sax player Danny Rottier. “But the internet was incredibly helpful for figuring out how things actually work and how other people do it. It also helped with the technical side of playing the instrument. There’s so much free knowledge available online, and we certainly made the most of that.”

Grote Geelstaart’s output thus far has left audiences consistently awestruck. When a recent clip of the band performing “Vracht 7” spiked interest on TikTok, the avalanche of reactions left them in a similarly astonished state. “It wasn’t the first time one of our videos blew up,” Danny says frankly. “But with this one, people are comparing us to…well, a whole lot of acts. We only vaguely recognise many of those bands, or don’t know them at all. We’d never even heard of DEVO.”

Though they’ve now proven to fit their Lovecraftian noise-prog spiels inside a small wooden box and even the back of a touring van, Grote Geelstaart (the Dutch word for the Great Yellowtail, a species of fish that would be considered invasive in the North Sea) are happily swimming out in the open, still caught up in exploring their strange, often stupefying internal dynamics. Poetically enough, the band’s rehearsal space, a two-story den embedded inside a community centre, is isolated with old books – literature serving as a seal to (barely) contain their mushrooming confluence of ideas.

“There is a book exchange shelf downstairs,” explains bassist Jeppe Rottier. “At one point, it was so packed with books that people simply stopped swapping them. I thought it would be a shame to throw them away, even though that was the original plan, since they were all ancient, outdated books full of utter nonsense. I figured that if you opened them up, the books would actually absorb sound. So, I stapled them all onto a huge board. It was quite a bit of work, but I think the result has a certain charm.”

Though the interview takes place in the midst of summer, the community centre isn’t exactly flooding with tourists like at the more coastal parts of Zeeland, despite being a meagre 15-minute drive away. Drummer/vocalist Finley Nijsse’s mother lives here in Kapelle. And before Grote Geelstaart settled their rehearsal space here roughly three years ago, Jeppe and Finley would work shifts at the bar and restaurant below.

“This place tends to get somewhat overlooked in these parts” says Jesper Rottier, the band's freewheeling second guitarist and occasional drummer – and the practitioner of those sleep paralysis demon-screeches on “Barch”. “It’s mainly the locals who come here during the summer days, but they are often away on holiday around this time.” The contrast between the brothers Jesper and Jeppe is quite comical: the former, with his spectacles and blonde curly mane, has the madcap air of a Gen-Z Geddy Lee, while the latter, looking like a young Val Kilmer, has a polite, punctual disposition.

Both brothers handle the brunt of non-music related to-do’s orbiting Grote Geelstaart, learning the ropes by osmosis. “I’m currently doing an internship as a production manager at music venue Gebouw T,” Jeppe says. “I handle a lot of pre-production with bands there, but from the other side of the process. I kind of fell into it, and I think I’ve become pretty well-versed in how it all works. I also handle some of the financial side of things with Jesper. Things like ‘Can we afford to bring a sound tech along or not? Or book an extra overnight stay?’, we discuss a lot on a daily basis.”

In case you hadn’t guessed yet, Grote Geelstaart is almost wholly a family affair. Before moving into the community centre, Jeppe and Jesper, together with their nephews Finley and Danny, rehearsed in a basement in the municipality of Leeuwendorp. Jesper and Finley attended drum lessons early on, before the critical mass of musical ideas outpaced the learning curve for technical foundation. Finley is the least outwardly wordy of the band, yet the velocity in which his eyes dart sideways during our conversation suggests a heap of ideas percolating in there, itching to be materialised.

That suspicion is confirmed when Jeppe reveals that the songs often start with Finely’s ideas, then expanded between the other band members. Where Jeppe can often be flexible between creating and just playing his parts, Finley can be headstrong in pushing through, a trait Jeppe sees as a net-positive within the overall chemistry between the five individuals. “It’s perhaps the foundation of the writing process, in any case,” Finley explains. “I really enjoy being deeply involved in creative thinking during the writing process.”

Though it may look perplexing from the outside looking in, Grote Geelstaart is already a well-oiled, fully functioning architecture of sound. If Finley, for the large part, facilitates the seed of ideas, Jeppe and Jesper act as wingmen with their respective order and chaos. Danny, meanwhile, acts as textural and melodic connective tissue switches assiduously between modular synths with saxophone.

“We’re still primarily a guitar-based band, so I’m often still figuring out my role and where I can add something,” Danny shares. Jeppe points out how Danny can easily slide into a main hook, like the buzzsawing synth-riff on “Barch”. “For certain tracks, I can easily say, ‘I’m not doing anything here,’” Danny says, “while still actively contributing ideas, such as adding atmosphere or shaping the transitions between songs.”

Mutual friend Luuk Bosma was the fifth and final member to join Grote Geelstaart, though Jesper reveals the band wasn’t explicitly looking for anyone to add anything to what they were already doing. He joined the band at a local gig to play a cover of “The River” by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and just kind of stuck around.

“What I encountered was an ambition or a desire to create something together,” he remembers. “But without any preconceived notion of exactly what it had to be. That was partly because we’re all self-taught and had each found our own way with our instruments. We tend to create things very intuitively, which really appealed to me. It just sort of clicked, like being the fifth piece of the puzzle, I guess. It wasn't a case of ‘we absolutely need you to join,’ it was just fun.”

Luuk added some essential elements to Grote Geelstaart, namely lead guitar and a manic stage presence. During shows he is frequently seen strangling himself with microphone cords and purposely devolving Dutch-sung diatribe into rabid gobbledygook. His protagonists are often figures who completely and utterly lose their shit, with the music acutely portraying their state of disarray. “Spookrijden”, for example, is depicted from the perspective of a man driving on the wrong side of the road, while on the erratic, woodwind-driven “Nat Zeil”, the lead single from new EP Wij Zinken (We’re Sinking), the band survey a shipwreck through the bloodshot eyes of its addled captain.

Compared to debut EP Van Reijnst, Grote Geelstaart, the storytelling on Wij Zinken became much more of a point of emphasis. He says that working alongside producer Tom Gudde has made their writing process more streamlined, keeping the band from overloading the songs with too many bells and whistles. “I feel that if we were to produce our songs entirely on our own, we’d never finish,” Jeppe says.

Now more confident in their sound design, Wij Zinken plays with extremes: expansive versus concise, loud versus soft, and short versus longer songs. “It’s a compositional approach we’ve discovered just recently; rather than focusing solely on melody, rhythm, and harmony, we’ve started looking more at textures as a way to create and sustain interest in a track,” says Danny.

Wij Zinken’s big slow-burner, “De Kering” (the Dutch term for storm surge barrier), expresses both the sheer reverence and the fear of being at the mercy of the sea’s massive currents, and you get the sense Grote Geelstaart plunges into something a little more deep-seated than their pet musical influences. “Back in the family home where Jesper and I grew up, if you were lying in your room, you could hear the boats passing on the Westerschelde,” Jeppe remembers. “You’d hear those massive container ships, just a faint sort of sub-drone.”

Because Grote Geelstaart’s live shows have been so staggeringly impressive, Luuk says he’s often confused by questions of whether the band members have a background in music college. “Where does that come from?” he wonders out loud. “Maybe the odd time signatures?” “I think we hit a sort of glass ceiling pretty quickly when it comes to our skills,” Jeppe adds. 

“But that ceiling keeps moving up,” Jesper notes. “That’s true, but you have to break through it every time,” his brother continues. “Then again, there are people with an insanely solid foundation, a sort of library of everything they can do, and they can just execute it effortlessly on the fly. And it works perfectly.”

Jesper thinks the overall growth of Grote Geelstaart can be attributed to the band setting high goals for themselves. “Finley, for instance, is a great drummer who keeps raising the bar, constantly practising and pushing himself,” he says. “That’s how you learn really fast.”

“We also play exclusively in Grote Geelstaart,” Luuk underlines. “The musicians Jeppe is referring to are often session players who work on a huge number of projects and have played in many different types of bands. I think that’s where you get such a broad repertoire and a solid foundation. We’re getting to know our instruments better and learning how to use them, but always in the context of one specific thing.”

Danny agrees. “We learned to play our instruments within this band. I think if you put one of us in a jazz band, we wouldn’t know what to do.” “I don’t think we’d be able to keep our heads above water!” adds Jeppe.

Given the velocity at which they’re turning heads, one could say Grote Geelstaart’s inner logic has served them pretty well thus far. Whatever parameters they will challenge next, much like the reckless driver of “Spookrijden”, it will be stubborn, thrilling, and sometimes a little forbidding as well.

Though the band seem happy to evolve at their own pace, it’s fun to wonder what they might become. Perhaps their generation’s Magma or This Heat? Or maybe they will end up laying the groundwork for a brand new sound, like a black midi or a Gilla Band? One could also see them going full prog, like Porcupine Tree or Genesis. Concurrently, you get the sense they are also exactly one great song away from becoming certified rock gods. 

Whether we’ll get to see Grote Geelstaart develop into something extraordinary doesn’t diminish the fact that they're a pretty extraordinary creature already. I think about how sea travellers of old would portray aquatic life as dragons, krakens, or leviathans, seeing so much wonder in them to the point of distorting their appearance in illustrations. It’s certainly something to write home about.