Personal Trainer announce new album, Human Assholes

Human Assholes follows 2024's Still Willing, with new single "Moping" arriving after the album's lead single "Punch Drunk Love". The track is also accompanied by a music video directed by singer Willem Smit, who explains: “To me, ‘Moping’ is mostly about being a musician and getting stuck inside your own loop a little bit. The song keeps circling back on itself lyrically and musically. The chorus uses this Pixies trick of looping three bars of 4/4 instead of four, so the loop never fully settles.”

For Human Assholes, the band chose to move away from the laptop-heavy writing process of their previous records, using acoustic guitar as the starting point with songs written in a physical room with the full band. The album was recorded live over six days, an approach Smit describes as “a more precise version of how we normally prepare new songs for a performance.”

“Every take that a group of people does simultaneously is a moment that has just happened and is shared by a group of people,” he continues. “If accidents happen, or if things do or do not go off the rails, that is part of what is happening in that performance. You give up some control, but for me, the decision-making became that much easier.”

Personal Trainer have also announced additional UK headline shows in Portsmouth and Cambridge, plus festival appearances at SWN and Future Days. Smit is also set to play a handful of solo instore shows around the album’s release.

“I have always looked at the role of music in my life with great enthusiasm,” Smit adds. “But also in a quite down-to-earth way. It is my greatest passion, but it is also just music, and that is precisely why it is important to me. It is a kind of sandbox I can sit in whenever I want. I have always been able to express myself through it as an outlet, but never was it as evident to me as during this process. It really felt like a ‘safe haven’ to sink my teeth into for days, while everything else wasn't going so well.”

Human Assholes artwork

Human Assholes tracklist

“Marvin’s Curtain Up”
“Scrambled Egg”
“Punch Drunk Love”
“Bone”
“Moping”
“Places!”
“The Burrows”
“Barely Guillaume”
“Hole”
“Human Assholes”
“Rim Shot / Event Horizon”
“Tempo”
“Tyres Skid”
“Object Permeance”
“Letter From A Scentless Realm”