21-year-old Oxford-via-Amsterdam Indie Pop artist Max Blansjaar has released his ‘False Comforts’ debut album via the Beanie Tapes label. Recorded in Brooklyn with producers Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn. "I started writing the first False Comforts songs in early 2020. It felt like a lot of talk happening around me was generational—the news covered generational challenges, my friends professed generational anxieties over Web 2.0, table service, and global crises they did not cause, I gave in and read Spotify’s apocalyptic ‘Who is Gen Z, Really?’ report in the search for self-knowledge—yet I struggled to ever identify with that category, which always struck me as more of a buzzphrase than as a genuine connection. At the same time, I was at the threshold of what was, for me, a new d ever had before. I felt the need to assert myself, to make music that reflected where I actually fit into the world of rituals and allegiances that was unfolding around me. Or, at least, that reflected the powerlessness of not knowing my place. I challenged myself to get straightforward. Stop chasing complexity and Follow Your Nose! Amongst others I owe a debt of gratitude to The Velvet Underground and to Elephant 6 for teaching me the power of the harmonically simple, to Beck and to Cate Le Bon for lyrical inspiration, and to a couple of experimental music groups I started playing with that got me to be bolder in my choice of sounds. It all made sense, finally, partway through our two weeks of recording the album. I came across Brad Liening’s poetry collection ‘Are You There, God? It’s Me, Whitney Houston’ at a bookshop in Dumbo one day (one of the last copies out there, he’s since told me), and when I opened it, there was the line: some explanations / last forever and never / answer a thing. Yahtzee! There doesn’t always have to be a solution, or a resolution; it can be rewarding, even necessary, to linger in a snapshot of a feeling for a while. In that sense, I knew these songs would be False Comforts. They wouldn’t fix anything, they wouldn’t give me answers, they wouldn’t help, they were pointless, unproductive hideouts, explanations lasting forever. And I found a strange comfort in them for that. Maybe someone else will, too." – Max Blansjaar