De Staat

A flat in Nijmegen, one man, one demo

De Staat started in 2006 as a solo project by Torre Florim, who recorded the first demo in his own flat in Nijmegen in 2007 and played almost every instrument on the debut himself. Wait for Evolution arrived in 2009 as largely a one-man record; the band that now carries the name was assembled afterwards, to make the thing playable on a stage.

That line-up has held for most of the band's working life: Florim on vocals and rhythm guitar, Vedran Mirčetić on lead guitar, Jop van Summeren on bass and synthesiser, Rocco Hueting on keys and percussion, Tim van Delft on drums. By 2010 they were playing outside the Netherlands, with sets at Glastonbury and at Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.

Fifteen years of awkward, danceable rock

Machinery followed in 2011 and became the record that took them abroad properly, released internationally through Cool Green Recordings, part of the Mascot Label Group. The Dutch industry had already noticed: 3FM Awards for Best Alternative Act came in both 2011 and 2012.

I_CON, released on 16 September 2013, won the Edison Award for Best Rock Album in 2014. O, in 2016, was the high-water mark for recognition at home — album of the year at both the 3FM Awards and the 3voor12 Awards — and its single Witch Doctor took Best Concept at the Berlin Music Video Awards the same year. In May 2016 the band opened for Muse on the European leg of the Drones World Tour, playing Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Bubble Gum arrived in 2019 and Red / Yellow / Blue in 2023.

What runs through all of it is a refusal to settle into straight rock: stuttering rhythms borrowed from funk and hip-hop, synthesisers used as percussion, songs built around a single repeated figure rather than a chorus. It made them a festival band without ever making them a comfortable one.

Two years of silence, then a name that had changed meaning

After Red / Yellow / Blue the band went quiet for roughly two years. The return came in April 2026 with a single called THE KING, followed by THE FIRE, which confirmed a seventh album — self-titled, simply DE STAAT — released on 18 September 2026 through V2 Records rather than their former label.

The self-titling is the argument. The band's name translates as 'the state', and Florim's line on the record is that the world moved towards the name rather than the other way round: the world, he has said, pulled them further down that dark path until the name felt as though it had taken on a whole new weight. The subjects are power, faith, storytelling, misinformation and artificial intelligence — and, he has been careful to say, not a dystopian future but the present.

The making of it was deliberately non-linear. Florim has described working on music, visuals, videos and artwork at the same time rather than writing songs first and dressing them afterwards, so that the album, an art installation and a live show would be one object. He is 40 now, with a family, and frames the whole thing less as a comeback than as surprise that the work is still possible and that an audience is still there for it.

A record reviewers admire more than they enjoy

The reception has been genuinely divided, and the split is instructive. German site MusikBlog called it the grumpiest record of the year and meant it as praise: abrasive percussion, deep synthesisers and distorted guitars that strangle any sense of good cheer, with THE KING opening on three and a half minutes of mounting synth and drums before a restrained countdown releases it, THE UNDERDOG turning from retro-rave into church organ, and GLORY escalating into the album's one outright anthem.

Dutch magazine OOR was much harder on it. Reviewer Reinier van der Zouw called the album the first real stumbling block of the band's career: strong at the top, thinning through the middle, a finale that arrives without a climax, and a closing AI-generated bonus track featuring Florim's voice that the review thought weakened the ending. The verdict was that ten songs of sophisticated production do not, on their own, add up, and that the album may only make full sense alongside the show and the installation.

That caveat is the point worth holding on to. DE STAAT was not designed to be judged as a standalone record, which is either a defence or an indictment depending on how much credit a band gets for intent.

De Staat Becomes De Staat

The live production is the largest thing the band has attempted. It was built with director Floor Houwink ten Cate, audiovisual artist Boris Acket, lighting designer Freek Ros, visual artist Tarik Barri and audio designer Reinier Rietveld. Florim plays a demagogue — climbing a staircase that stands in for power, working a red podium, with the show darkening as he ascends and the line between performance and character deliberately smeared.

It premiered on 3 July 2026 at Down The Rabbit Hole in Beuningen, in the festival's Teddy Widder tent, and the response was split along the same seam as the album reviews. OOR's live review, headlined on the idea that the band were caught between two minds, praised Florim's acting — a credible slide between demagogue and entertainer — and singled out Mirčetić's guitar solo in GLORY as almost frightening, while objecting that the conceptual material sat badly next to the older party tracks and that the rest of the band stood largely still. The tent, the review said, was much too small for what was being attempted. The festival's own audience poll nonetheless placed the set tenth among the best performances of the weekend.

The theatre version is the real test. Two nights at Koninklijk Theater Carré in Amsterdam, on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026, give the production a room built for staging rather than a field.

Where they stand, autumn 2026

The touring plan runs from a Belgian warm-up at De Casino in Sint-Niklaas on 25 September 2026 through Carré in early October, then a German run in late October taking in Heidelberg, Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, and on through Prague, Munich, Zurich, Paris and Bruges in the first week of November.

The UK and Ireland leg lands in the second week of November: Thekla in Bristol on 9 November, Band on the Wall in Manchester on 10 November, Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on 14 November and Scala in London on 15 November, with Dublin and Glasgow also on the itinerary. Hiqpy opens the British shows.

The band's publicity frames the project as marking 25 years of work, which is generous arithmetic against a 2006 start. The more useful measure is that a band who could have returned with a straightforward rock record instead spent two years building an album, an installation and a piece of theatre that only fully reads when all three are in the same room — and then took the risk of letting critics see the weakest of the three first.