Though Ha Ha Heartbreak, Maarten Devoldere’s third album as Warhaus, was released just two years ago, the emotional arc of the music between that and his newest LP, Karaoke Moon, suggests a long emotional journey. On the sleeve art of the former, Devoldere stands with a cigarette in his mouth, a look close to a scowl on his face. However, the music that sprawls across the ten tracks of Ha Ha Heartbreak contains no tough guy posturing. Even on the menacing croon of “It Had to Be You”, the lovelorn Devoldere confesses to his ex-love, “You’re mistaking me for someone in control.” Then, in the closing number, “Best I Ever Had”, Devoldere slides into despondency. On an album full of bombastic string arrangements and slinky grooves, he drops the curtain on his heartbreak with muted resignation: “All I ever wanted was a lot / To be your man was something I could not.”
Karaoke Moon begins on the opposite end of the emotional register. Lead single “Where the Names Are Real” hangs on a simple refrain, with twinkling keys in the background: “Babe, I’m in love with you.” Its climactic moment occurs when Devoldere, bursting with earnestness, exclaims that he just “wants to be corny” for his paramour. Ha Ha Heartbreak clearly got him through his woes. The Devoldere of Karaoke Moon sounds personally rejuvenated; though his prior album marked an aesthetic high as compelling as the best music he’s made with his longstanding rock outfit Balthazar, its lyrics document what was no doubt a fraught season of his life.
Not long after Devoldere, calling from his native Belgium, appears on my Zoom screen just shy of a month prior to Karaoke Moon’s late November release, I ask him if there’s something particularly magical going on in his world to explain his productivity in the last half-decade. Joining Ha Ha Heartbreak on his résumé are Balthazar’s two strongest albums, 2019’s Fever and 2021’s Sand. That band now seems to thrum with creative energy: Karaoke Moon is the third solo effort in 2024 to come from the quintet, following bassist Simon Casier’s Love Songs (under the name Zimmerman) and vocalist/guitarist Jinte Deprez’s Contigo (under the J. Bernardt moniker).
Devoldere gently shuts down my question. “I’ve had people tell me that I work so hard. But I’ve been doing a record every two years, and that’s ten songs apiece. That’s not hard work! The Beatles did two records a year, two masterpieces a year. I think I can do better.”
Karaoke Moon, though, emerged from a long writing period, including during his many bouts of European touring. Location played a significant part in Ha Ha Heartbreak, which Devoldere wrote during a three-week stint in the Sicilian city of Palermo, whose pale sandy beaches appear in the music videos filmed for singles “Shadow Play” and “It Had to Be You”. Another coastal city, Morocco, facilitated the creation of Karaoke Moon numbers “Jacky N.” – a wistful string-led instrumental named for Devoldere’s godson – and “The Winning Numbers”, but otherwise his new music did not find its source in any one place. “I like to be writing constantly,” he says, a habit that proved to be a bugbear for his girlfriend on the Moroccan holiday they’d planned. Not long after Ha Ha Heartbreak’s release, he amassed 30 demos to craft the next Warhaus record.
In contrasting the compositional processes behind Ha Ha Heartbreak and Karaoke Moon, Devoldere reveals the alternative paths he took to create the latter’s music. “I’m still figuring it out,” he replies when I ask if there’s a concept behind his new LP. “A breakup album is, in a way, very easy to write because you can’t write about anything else when you’re going through something like that. Whereas now, life has been very kind to me. I tried to keep track of a lot of subconscious things. I did psychedelics; I went to a hypnotherapist. It was like an experiment.”
His account of the Karaoke Moon songwriting takes some surprising turns. “I wanted to find out what I’d babble when I’d undergo hypnosis. During the third session, my therapist hypnotized me while I did a whole jam playing piano. I recorded it, took it back home, and started playing around with it. I also kept a better record of dreams – all the things you can’t really control but your subconscious offers you about yourself.”
This artistic posture of giving oneself up to someone else, perhaps even the person that lives in the basement of one’s mind, characterizes Devoldere’s attitude to what has now become Karaoke Moon. He may be the driving force behind the Warhaus name, but now, on his fourth album, he has grown more comfortable letting others take the reins of his ideas. With his arsenal of demos ready, Devoldere took his newest material to his producer, Jasper Maekelberg, who provided some pointed but necessary criticism. “When I took them to Jasper he was like, ‘Yeah, they’re good songs, I know you can write these pop songs, but they don’t surprise me anymore. You need to raise the bar for yourself as an artist.’ He convinced me that I had to challenge myself a bit more.”
One of Maekelberg’s primary suggestions was for Devoldere to start with lyrics instead of music, the opposite of his custom. I ask Devoldere about the prevalence of sing-talking throughout Karaoke Moon, evident in the verses of “Where the Names are Real” and the whole structure of “The Winning Numbers”, which feels like the reading of a diary entry that by chance blossoms into a song. He attributes these to Maekelberg’s guidance.
“Jasper’s role is even bigger than on the previous record,” he elaborates. “The longer we work together, the more I trust him. When you’re younger, you’re more insecure, kind of a control freak, not trusting with anyone when it comes to your music because it’s this holy thing. But we have built such a nice understanding over the years, and we trust each other’s musical tastes. I gave him a lot of freedom to do whatever he wanted with the songs. The arrangement of ‘Jim Morrison’ and ‘No Surprise’ – he really turned those around from my original ideas of them. He’s the Warren Ellis to my Nick Cave, in a way.”
The result of Devoldere and Maekelberg’s collaboration is a further development of the Warhaus sound apotheosized on Ha Ha Heartbreak. Moody crooning, R&B basslines, jazzy guitars, hypnotic repetition, and melancholy string arrangements coalesce into a sonic blend that feels as much a piece of contemporary indie rock as it does in the 1970s. In moments, the music achieves a cinematic quality, as in “Jacky N.”, an interplay of strings and keys that sounds like the score to a crepuscular scene set on the Riviera in a French romantic drama.
Devoldere’s account of his influences makes sense for such a time-spanning sound: “As a kid, I was a big fan of Cream. As I matured a bit more, I got into all the classic songwriters: I’m a big Bob Dylan fan, Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Gainsbourg, all the greats. I had a big Radiohead phase as well. In Belgium, we also have dEUS; in the 1990s, when we were young, they were the national icons.” The 1990s also make a surprising appearance in the coda to “Zero One Code”, where Devoldere, joined by frequent collaborator and fellow Belgian Sylvie Kreusch in an enigmatic duet, wordlessly chants atop a groove that he calls a “tribute to these 1990s European dance tracks that, as a kid, weren’t really my thing, but were part of the popular culture I grew up with.”
However, it’s a figure from the older era of Devoldere’s musical inspirations who takes center stage on Karaoke Moon’s longest track, “Jim Morrison”. Over the course of nearly seven minutes, he performs a monologue in song form, rhythmically rambling about a range of masculine neuroses: semen consumption rituals in Papua New Guinea, the myth of Icarus, and sunglass betrayals. As his musings grow increasingly unpredictable, the same soul-inflected hook keeps the song anchored: “It takes a man to love you, baby,” a sentiment that becomes increasingly more ironic as the track unfolds.
As it turns out, the song’s shaggy feel and structure originate in Devoldere’s composition-by-hypnotherapy, in which the Doors’ frontman became a recurring subconscious character. “I started asking myself, ‘Why does that name come up?’ My take on it is that it’s the cliché male rock star with the leather pants who takes his dick out at concerts; he gets in trouble a lot, he’s super destructive.” He clarifies that “it’s what [Morrison] represents,” not any historical reportage – or his own self-image.
“I don’t look at myself as a rock star,” he says with care. Morrison serves as an archetype into which Devoldere could cast himself, should he so desire. “In Warhaus, I write a lot about destructive forces. I need to watch over them very carefully so that they don’t sweep me away. Sometimes I feel like I just want to fuck things up, but when you’re 35, it becomes sad if you’re hanging on to that lifestyle.” The “Jim Morrison” of Karaoke Moon embodies “ego, pride, and narcissistic reflexes.” For Devoldere, it’s an archetype of “fire”: “play with it and you get burned,” he says with a tone that suggests the knowingness of experience.
After all, Balthazar are a rock band, and watching footage of their European festival performances, one could hardly be faulted for calling Devoldere a rock star. He and fellow frontman Deprez fit the part on more than a few markers. I ask him if he perceives his audience as still wanting the classic rock star figure. “People are going to project onto people who perform all the time,” he replies. “Obviously, the whole macho rock star isn’t very fashionable these days, but it’s something I like to play with. It represents a kind of ego, a shadow side.” Ultimately, as he looks back on the song now, he describes it as “a quest for answers where you’re confused about everything.”
Introspection similarly colors the closing number, “Emely”, which, like Ha Ha Heartbreak’s “Best I Ever Had”, prefers subtlety over bombast for a finale. There is an upswing in energy right before it on the groovy “I Want More”, a song that also has a mirror in the previous Warhaus record’s low-end focused “Shadow Play”. Across his two most recent LPs, Devoldere has practiced a common and idiosyncratic belief about tracklist sequencing: the penultimate should be an upswing. With both of his last records coming in at ten tracks, “It’s very important that the second-to-last track is exciting, something that you didn’t see coming, that shakes you awake. Then, the last one can lay it down. If number nine is good, it’s probably going to be a good record.”
When “Emely” then “lays things down,” to borrow his parlance, Devoldere wraps up Karaoke Moon examining his desires, leaving the listener with a closing image of an uncertain road ahead: “‘Cause Emely you wanted me to take turns / I just wanted us to head on straight / if I could take it back I would repeat it / a thousand times before you turn away.” The song builds to a crescendo that collapses into silence, with only a lone low piano note ringing quietly to Karaoke Moon’s close. At the end of all his internal exploration, Devoldere seems to have gained insights into himself, but he’s still far away from the deeper paths into his unconscious that he might have hoped to tread in the process of making this music.
But when I ask Devoldere about the title of his new LP, a lyrical phrase in the sultry duet with Kreusch “No Surprise”, he extemporizes philosophically in a way that reveals the biggest revelation clarified by his sojourns into the hypnotic realm. “I have an explanation for what it means to me, but I don’t know if I even want to explain it,” he says at first. He then pauses for nearly ten seconds. Before I can fully tell him that I’m fine letting Karaoke Moon remain ambiguous, he provides me with a brief summary of his thinking.
“[It’s] just something about the illusion of free will. I don’t really believe in it; I believe everything is dictated by our subconscious. We have the illusion we make our decisions. In that way, it’s kind of like karaoke, when you’re borrowing the lyrics on the screen. That had something to do with it.” He pauses. “But it’s very possible that in six months, I’m going to give a completely different answer. I think especially with this record, I’m going to keep discovering things about what was going on in my mind when I was writing it.”
In this view on free will, Devoldere joins a growing number of determinists, who in the public sphere include individuals like Sam Harris. Philosophically, I couldn’t disagree more with Devoldere, though I hadn’t undergone the kind of hypnotic experimentation to which he had subjected himself. But for whatever intellectual objections I may have with the notion of free will being nonexistent, in listening to Devoldere explain all that went into making Karaoke Moon, I at least can appreciate the artistic valence that determinism can take.
There is so much writing on art, and artists indulge in the notion of artistic genius, who, through their singular aesthetic insight, produces things that others then help bring into the world. I am not one to indulge such an obviously limited view of artistic creation, but listening to the music Devoldere has made in the past decade, it has seemed to me that he has unlocked some interior wellspring of creativity that has made it possible for him to make the music he’s made. Yet at the end of our conversation, the things he’s most consistently emphasized to me are the rewards that come from letting others work with one’s creativity – our wills be damned. Perhaps it would all do us some good to call up our local hypnotherapist.
