Dutch indie-rock band Pip Blom is a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know.
Guy Eppel*Some bands reach greatness by inventing something new, others by reminding you of what you loved a long time ago. For Pip Blom, the 23-year-old sparkplug who leads the Dutch alt-rock band of the same name, the choice was clear. Growing up surrounded by peers who listened to Top 40 pop — “Jason Derulo, stuff like that,” she says dismissively — Pip and her younger brother Tender, 21, gravitated instead to the old Blur and Oasis records their parents played at home.
“All my favorite bands were British back then,” she says. “It was always a bit difficult, looking for friends to go to gigs with.”
Pip spent much of her late teens teaching herself how to sing and play guitar like her U.K. rock heroes, whose ranks grew to include more contemporary acts like Arctic Monkeys and Micachu and the Shapes. This summer, she and her brother, along with drummer Gini Cameron and bassist Darek Mercks (both 23), made good on those lonely but instructive years by releasing their debut LP, Boat — an instantly catchy set of burnt-sugar hooks that would fit perfectly into the Blom family record collection. If you came across the dreamy frustration of “Say It” or the grungier grumble of “Tinfoil” on a mixtape dated 1997, you’d swear they were forgotten Britpop gems; find them on a streaming playlist today and they just might be your new favorite songs.
Sitting in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, café on the last day of their first-ever trip together to the U.S., the young musicians chat happily over early-afternoon Brooklyn Lagers and IPAs. “You look like little angels,” a waitress says as she clears a round of empty pint glasses.
All four grew up in Amsterdam, with Pip and Tender learning about the music industry via their parents’ tales of the Eighties, when their dad played in a punk band that landed repeat gigs on John Peel’s influential BBC radio show and their mom was the band’s live engineer. (Today both are journalists.) “Most kids, there’s a period where they dislike what their parents love, but we’ve not really had that,” Pip says. “We think they’re really cool!”
Toward the end of high school, Pip saw a poster for a local singer-songwriter contest and decided to enter. Messing around on a three-stringed lute their dad had backed on Kickstarter, she found that songwriting came naturally. “I banged out all these songs — verse/chorus/verse, I don’t think there’s even a bridge in any of them,” she says. “And I made it to the semi-finals, which was quite surprising.”
Performing solo gigs around town for the contest helped her realize that she’d rather front a band. The only problem? “She couldn’t find anyone who wanted to play with her,” Tender says, laughing. “So she kept asking me, but I didn’t want to be in a band. Too much work for my lazy ass.”
Eventually she convinced her little brother to join her in their family’s home studio, where they recorded a few voice-and-guitar demos that were good enough to land on a Spotify playlist for new bands. “Of course, it wasn’t, like, a Billie Eilish explosion,” Pip says. “But to me it felt really big.”
She was weighing her options after a gap year when her father told her not to shortchange her music. “He was like, ‘I don’t think you should go to college. This is something very special — maybe just give it time to see where it ends up,’” she recalls.
She and Tender cycled through two tentative rhythm sections for their band before finding Mercks and Cameron, both of whom had more experience playing in bands than they did. (“At one point I was in six or seven bands at the same time,” says Mercks, who also spent four years studying bass guitar in the pop department of a prestigious Amsterdam music school.) They booked Pip Blom’s first U.K. tour by cold-emailing local promoters and journalists — it’s still the country where they’ve spent the most time touring — and headed to the seaside town of Ramsgate, England, last fall to record their debut with producer Dave McCracken.
They all sound pleasantly giddy about finishing their first album. “The test pressing arrived at our home, and I gave one to my mum and dad to have a listen,” Pip says. “And then I had a listen as well, and I really liked it.”
Both of them still live at home, where their parents continue to support their indie-rock dreams. Pop Blom has been to every one of their gigs; Mom Blom books their hotel rooms on tour (they’ll be back in the U.S. for a handful of dates this November) and maintains a spreadsheet with their streaming play counts, which she makes sure to keep them current on. “Sometimes I come downstairs and I just want to relax, and I’m like, give me a break!” Pip says. “They can be annoying. But they’re really sweet.”
ON THE RISE
Even more than 6,000km away from her hometown of Santurce, Puerto Rico, RaiNao still manages to keep a piece of home with her. It’s Monday morning in Madrid, and the 32-year-old, born Naomi Ramírez Rivera, is calmly sipping on a cup of black coffee surrounded by fan palms and chestnut trees inside the terrace of her hotel. Coffee is her morning ritual back home, and things don’t change even if mere hours ago she was performing in front of 70,000 people as a guest on Bad Bunny’s ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’ residency in the city.
“I think it was the biggest venue I’ve ever performed at, or maybe it was Brazil,” RaiNao gushes, referring to her February appearance on the tour in São Paulo. Ultimately, the numbers don’t matter; for her, it’s all about the experience. “Even if I had done it 10 times over, it’s always beautiful and a different surprise.”
Music has always been a constant in RaiNao’s life. She began playing the saxophone at 11, but she never thought it would be the way she would make a living. “It’s all Wiso Rivera’s fault,” she says with a laugh. During the pandemic, her then-boyfriend and now creative partner and go-to co-producer encouraged her to go for it. She was stuck in a rut, juggling part-time jobs, when she realised that was not the life she wanted to lead.
“I felt overwhelmed that I thought, ‘Am I really going to spend the rest of my life working inside a bank?’ Wiso told me, ‘We have the tools, the studio is right there. Let’s just do it.’ And we did it.” Her stage name followed naturally. The moniker, a play on her nickname “Nao” with the creolisation of “right now,” is her own carpe diem. “It’s become a mantra for me,” she explains. “I’m in the moment all the time now. It’s a goal and a way of life.”
That now is what has taken RaiNao to global stages, performing ‘PERFuMITO NUEVO’ across the world, on US television, and gaining new listeners along the way. The song is what has put her on the map, and she’s more than grateful to Bad Bunny for the exposure. “He’s an artist who knows what he wants but also gives you your space to create,” she says, adding that their collaboration flowed as smoothly as a hot knife through butter. “I had a lot of freedom, and I’m always going to be thankful for that. I love that type of creative connection; it’s intuitive. We listen to each other. It’s great when anyone connects with your music, but he’s obviously a very important artist for Puerto Rico. Knowing he appreciates my music and my art, and that he says it every time he gets the chance, is incredible.”
She believes it’s precisely this type of interdependent local network that makes the Puerto Rican music scene as special as it is. “The support between artists has been key in careers that blow up,” she says. “We really do rely on each other and uplift each other constantly. It’s beautiful.”
The same way she got the cosign from Bad Bunny, RaiNao is also sharing the spotlight with Puerto Rican talent on her latest project, her second studio album, ‘Marcría’, a play on words that refers to both the PR slang for “spoiled brat” and “sea-raised”. In the 16-track album, RaiNao lends the mic to up-and-coming local musician Frido Vargas, who released his first song, ‘Mareo’, as part of the project.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know goes hard and deserves as many ears and eyes as I do,” she says. Her debut studio album, ‘Capicú’, followed a similar pattern with the inclusion of Gyanma’s ‘Bajo Candau’.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know deserves as many ears and eyes as I do”
“Puerto Rico’s indie scene is bustling, and you need to be on the island, soaking it up, to know [local artists],” RaiNao shares. Her label was “sweating” when she proposed including ‘Mareo,’ but when Vargas played the song for her, she knew it belonged in ‘Marcría’.
That’s not to say the project isn’t entirely RaiNao’s. Though it borrows its name from the sea, her ultimate “safe space”, ‘Marcría’ is born from RaiNao’s experience at 10, when her mother enrolled her in a school for the visually impaired. The album is a sensory journey accompanied by guided meditation, colour visualizers, and more to tell the full picture. You’ll notice green is a predominant theme. Emerald is RaiNao’s birthstone and the central piece of a ring she received in sixth grade, when she graduated from said school. As such, the hue has tinged the entire album, manifesting in music videos and in the small orb featured on the cover art.
On YouTube, she has microstories for each song that complement the sensory experience. “Not everyone has seen those, and they form a little story that I wrote based on the sensorial treatments,” she explains. “That came first, and then came the songs. It was an experiment.”
Only two tracks were created before the overarching theme was set: ‘Chamberí’ and the single ‘Gris’, which the artist initially intended to give to someone else. Legendary producer Tainy reached out and asked her to send over a few songs for his repertoire, and RaiNao obliged. “I sent him a few, but I kept going back to ‘Gris’ and thinking it was my song; someone else might like it, but they aren’t going to like it as much as I do.” It wasn’t until she was already structuring the project’s concept that she felt she needed to ask for it back. “I felt no other song exemplified water as much as ‘Gris’ did.”
Another emotional crux on the album is ‘Cántaro’, featuring salsa legend Andy Montañez, one of many remarkable collaborations alongside the likes of Omara Portuondo and Cultura Profética. The song marked the first time RaiNao recorded her own sax in her career. “I know that there are better sax players in Puerto Rico whose sound is way better than mine, and I always tap them to record,” she explains, “but this was a very personal song, and it needed to be me even if the result is not the best.”
The melody for the track was born from a sample of her voice and was later re-envisioned and reworked into a brass comp. Her sax is complemented by a bassoon, played by her best friend, who sent in recordings from Jacksonville, Florida. The result is her take on the “Death of the Author” literary theory and, in a way, her own eulogy. “Once you put out a project, it dies for you,” RaiNao explains, “but with that death comes another birth, another interpretation.”
‘Marcría’ comes to a close with the track that lends it its name, which sees RaiNao reciting a poem by the late Puerto Rican artist Ángelamaría Dávila, included in the 1966 poemario ‘Homenaje al ombligo’. RaiNao serendipitously came across Dávila’s work while working on the album. Upon reading this poem, she was stunned. It perfectly encapsulated the project. “It’s remarkable that this poem was born years ago from the mind of another Puerto Rican woman who’s no longer with us.”
RaiNao toyed with the idea of borrowing from the poem and playing around with vocal layering to use it as an interlude in a song that she’d call ‘Garabato’ (slang for “scribble”). “I wanted something simple that’d bridge the project from its more danceable side to its darker side,” she recalls. Ultimately, she felt the poem, as it was, was the perfect summary, a bio to ‘Marcría’.
Throughout the process of working on this album and the accolades it’s brought her, including a spot in YouTube’s Foundry Class, RaiNao feels “blessed and happy”, but she knows the final word no longer belongs to her; it belongs to the world. “For me, art is very spiritual. I knew I came into this world to leave it a better place with my art,” she says. “I’m always going to try not to dehumanise myself, not to stray too far away from myself to create.”
RaiNao’s ‘Marcría’ is out now via Rimas Entertainment.
