Docile Bodies go with their gut

Photo Credit: Loïs de Vries

What happens when you approach songwriting using intuition and emotion? For Dutch post-punk band Docile Bodies, that resulted in creating one of the most exciting albums of the year. Light WIll Come Our Way, released by the influential indie label A La Carte Records, is the band’s debut album. The band is Sjoerd Aarden (vocals), Merl van der Markt (guitar), Tadzio van Bel (bass), and Hans Diks (drums). The 8-track release is described as “a collection of meditations on art, nature and family.” Beyond its surface, Light WIll Come Our Way is an analysis of hope, growth, and possibilities.

On Light WIll Come Our Way the band aligns to glue together influences while at the same time carving out their own sound. At times, you pick up on hints of Joy Division (“Marble Souls”) and The Cure (“Tactile Poetics”). There’s an organic cohesion to the album, which is the band’s distinct style. The driving force of the bass and drums, Aarden’s voice stretching the syllables of his poetry, and the guitar tracing its own patterns, all working together in unison. On “Raw Material,” the introduction of a saxophone, played by Levi Pols, creates a sonic texture that accentuates the emptiness that Aarden vocalizes. “We might recognize the patterns of decay / As we march along the fields of disarray,” he sings. The album was mixed and produced by Wessel van den Broek, who has worked with the band since their first single. Van den Broek quickly honed in on what the band was trying to achieve. Light WIll Come Our Way showcases the band’s willingness to be guided by feeling rather than theory.

We spoke with vocalist Sjoerd Aarden about Docile Bodies working as one organism, collaborating with Wessel van den Broek, experimenting with genre and more.

First, congrats on Light Will Come Our Way. You’ve talked about the band moving together like one organism. Is that something you think happened naturally with time or something that you were intentional about achieving?

Aarden: Thanks a lot! It definitely wasn’t intentional, but I think it happened quite naturally because the process of writing music is something we learned in this formation. At least for a huge part. Me (Sjoerd) and Hans [Diks, drums] had played in bands before, but never as dedicated as with Docile Bodies. Also, none of us are very theoretically skilled, so we had to find our own ways to communicate what we wanted to achieve within our songs. The lack of theoretical mediation forces a more intuitive and emotionally invested approach to songwriting, which we hope shines through on the record. We also share a great sense of indecisiveness when it comes to the sort of music we want to play, which gives rise to the amalgamation of influences we hope people hear in our music. 

You’ve been working with producer Wessel van den Broek since the first single “Only This.” How has that working relationship evolved over the years?

Aarden: Wessel really is somewhat of a genius. A great producer of course, but also one of the most interesting musicians I’ve ever played with. And he’s only gotten better over the years. As I said before, we really had to turn into some kind of … organism to do what we wanted to do, whereas Wessel can just join at any given moment and completely understand what you’re trying to do. He’s actually joining us for a couple of shows during these last months of 2024 and we hope he’ll be involved with what's to come. 

You’ve used landscapes in your artwork to convey a message of desolation and hopelessness. At what point do you start thinking about visual work and how it relates to the music you’re working on?

Aarden: In the past, I often used the idea of a barren landscape as a metaphor for the anguish and emptiness I felt in my college years and early twenties. Because it felt easy and accurate, but also because it comes quite naturally to us as we’re all fans of hiking and nature. For this record, I’ve tried to apply a more holistic view to this idea, I dare even say a little confident at times. 

The artwork for Light Will Come Our Way is a photograph made by Icelandic artist Jón Helgi Pálmason. I stumbled upon his work when doing some research for a trip I was making to Iceland. We were all in awe by his pictures, especially the one that we’ve used for the cover. It’s a building at the northernmost tip of the Icelandic mainland. I think it’s a combination of the vastness of the landscape, the human traces left by the abandoned house and half buried bucket and the glowing colour of the vegetation that resonated with us and our music. 

“Raw Material” features Levi Pols on saxophone. How do you balance experimentation without sacrificing the band’s core sound?

Aarden: I don’t think we ever really thought about it that way to be honest. The saxophone is making explicit what has always informed the band’s core sound. If anything, we would love to experiment more in our forthcoming work. Maybe let our love for ambient, hardcore and metal shine through more clearly. 

Levi himself is part of a very cool collective called H.U.T., also from Tilburg. They play a crazy combination of jazzy kraut post-punk with a lot of improvisation. We really admire their way of working. 

Is there anything else you want people to know about Light Will Come Our Way?

Aarden: Nothing specific, only the response to the album has been overwhelming and we are very thankful to everyone that has listened to it and supported us.

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Light Will Come Our Way is out now. To purchase the light yellow color-in-color 12" vinyl in North America, head to Bandcamp. You can also listen on Spotify or wherever you stream music. Follow Docile Bodies on Instagram.

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