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.”
Based in London, vocalist and DJ iKeda already appears to be following the path of a major pop act, although she is hesitant to accept that description. “These days, it’s just too easy to call someone a pop star,” she tells NME during a conversation in the sunshine at a Hackney pub garden. With her newest EP ‘Bangs N Braces’ almost here, she insists that such recognition should be deserved. “You really need to earn your stripes to have that label. Someone like PinkPantheress or Addison Rae, they’re building a whole image and world – those are true pop stars.”
Although she has yet to reach the same heights as those artists, her career is clearly gaining momentum. Since 2024, she has released songs combining the irresistible energy of UK funky, electroclash and dancehall, while becoming a familiar face across the London underground electropop scene. One of her biggest opportunities arrived earlier this year when she was invited to open for PinkPantheress during the celebrated ‘Fancy That’ tour, an experience she describes as “almost like a dream”.
“I just couldn’t believe I was playing venues that size at this point in my career,” she recalls. Instead of allowing those initial worries to overwhelm her, she transformed them into “super healing positive energy” and committed herself to delivering the strongest performances possible. “I told myself that I was asked to do this for a reason, that I need to take the audience reception as actual constructive criticism and not crash out. It was too amazing an opportunity not to go one hundred per cent full throttle.”
With a tequila soda in hand, iKeda discusses a musical palette shaped by everyone from Santigold to SOPHIE. However, much of her creativity is fuelled by the trusted circle of friends and artists around her. Fellow club scene regular Babymorocco encouraged her to try songwriting in 2024, leading to her debut single ‘Luv Drunk’: “It was such a far-away concept, going into the studio and writing, but he started doing it, and I saw how quickly he got good.”
Her childhood was divided between Tottenham’s “concrete jungle” and life aboard a houseboat in the peaceful surroundings of Cambridge, giving iKeda an early instinct for creating stories. During her teenage years, she tried her hand at short fiction before studying visual art at Central Saint Martins. “It’s so powerful when you can take something into your own hands and write these things which you wish could happen in real life,” she says while discussing why visuals remain so essential to her creative identity. “I love just being in a world when I’m listening to music.”
That sense of entering another reality sits at the heart of ‘Bangs N Braces’, her forthcoming second EP. The project steps away from the Y2K dance pop character of her 2024 debut, ‘Pretty Little Problem’, and moves deeper into dancehall and funky house. It also serves as her personal declaration of the “gyal dem” lifestyle. In iKeda’s eyes, the meaning of being a “gyal” is not limited by gender or sexuality: “It’s all about one goal, moving toward complete liberation. It’s about maximising disruption, taking up space regardless of if someone has a problem with it.”
That fearless attitude has helped her explore sounds she previously felt nervous about approaching. “Jamaicans can be very perfectionistic about their dancehall, so I’ve always been a little bit intimidated,” she admits before explaining how the music honours her Windrush heritage. “I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, and I’m finally at the place where I’m confident in exploring that.”
The result is a sound iKeda has named “bubblegum riddim”, blending electronic club pop with dancehall rhythms. “I feel an obsession with music that’s very effervescent and bubbly – it’s like your head is fizzing.” Beneath that sugary surface, however, lies something much rougher. “A lot of pop music is meant to sound quite tuned,” she says. “But with bubblegum riddim, there’s an edge. I love how in a lot of ’90s dancehall, the female vocals are a little off-key, almost fighting the beat.”
“I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras”
Across ‘Bangs N Braces’, this refreshed creative perspective moves between the grime coloured intensity of ‘Red Red’ and the bright dancehall energy of ‘Go!’ and ‘Meoww’. ‘Tiger Tiger’ captures both iKeda’s vivid imagination and growing confidence. “I was going down memory lane with old childhood books, and I saw The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The story morphed into this whole thing, like there’s this secret club and you can only go if you’re a bad girl.” Alongside surreal visions of mysterious potions and twisting white rabbits, the song reflects a broader personal transformation: “It’s part of my new path of just completely feeling myself.”
With the EP arriving later this month, iKeda says her newfound confidence has brought a welcome sense of freedom that is now influencing how she writes. “I just want to make feel-good music because that’s how I’m feeling right now,” she says. Even though her songs capture the carefree thrill of club pop, she treats simple melodies with genuine seriousness. “People don’t understand how hard it is to write a catchy hook without it turning into slop,” she explains. Her perfectionist nature keeps her focused on every small element, including “the little intros and interludes, which labels don’t care about but that listeners love”.
Although she is not ready to describe herself as a pop star, her ambitions suggest she already possesses the imagination and determination required to become one. “I just want to improve everything. I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras,” she says when asked about her future, revealing the constant drive behind her creativity. “Right now I’m trusting more in my ideas. I’m eternally grateful for all of the good times I’ve had, but I definitely have more to say.”
iKeda’s ‘Bangs N Braces’ EP arrives August 28 through Orbit Artist Group.
