Inge Lamboo

Lisserbroek, a phone and four instruments

Inge Lamboo grew up in Lisserbroek, a village in the Haarlemmermeer polder, and has been making music since the age of fifteen. She taught herself guitar, piano, drums and bass instead of specialising, which is the practical reason her records can be assembled by one person in a small room. She went through the Herman Brood Academie, the Dutch pop-academy route, and appeared on the eleventh season of The Voice of Holland in 2020 — the conventional Dutch launchpad, and one that on its own has rarely been enough to build anything lasting.

The part that worked was cheaper than any of it. Most of her early videos were recorded in her parents' house on a phone setup, and that output, not the television exposure, is what moved. She was picked for the Popronde circuit in 2020, playing with a three-piece behind her — Bram van der Schans on guitar, Mitchell van Wees on bass, Jos Hoens on drums — and she has since moved to Haarlem, where she works in a studio room rather than the bedroom.

The covers did the recruiting

Her breakthrough came from English-language versions of songs by K3, the Flemish-Dutch children's pop group — an unglamorous source that happened to have an enormous audience. Her version of 'Hart Verloren' passed 1.5 million views on TikTok, and by the time NH Nieuws profiled her she had roughly 145,000 followers there and 5.1 million likes. The range widened from Guus Meeuwis to Måneskin, and the habit eventually crossed onto streaming: an English version of 'Brabant' was released as a single in 2025.

The one that changed the trajectory was a mash-up rather than a cover: Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain' welded to Arctic Monkeys' 'Do I Wanna Know', which took around 800,000 views on TikTok and drew attention from Lindsey Buckingham, who had written the first of those songs' most recognisable parts. Pete Townshend saw the same clip and sent her a direct message saying he was looking forward to more. Lamboo's own position on all of this has been consistent and slightly impatient — social media is fine, but the energy of a live room cannot be reproduced online.

Black Heart, and the first real rooms

Her debut album, Black Heart, was finished in 2019 and did not come out until 2023, a four-year gap that says something about how long the industry took to catch up with the streaming numbers. It earned her a Veronica oorkonde for the title single, and it got her onto stages considerably larger than the ones she could book herself: she opened for Floor Jansen in sold-out halls, which for a solo singer-songwriter with a phone-built following was a substantial jump in scale.

The other strand of her public work is explicitly queer. She was made a Pride Amsterdam ambassador and wrote 'LIKE A PHOENIX' in 2024 as a Pride anthem, released with a video; 'Two Empty Eyes' followed the same year. That material is not incidental to the songwriting — queer identity sits alongside heartbreak and mental health as one of the recurring subjects of the record that came next.

A blues written in three hours

When Townshend messaged her, Lamboo did the obvious thing rather than the polite one: at two in the morning she asked whether he would play on a track she had not yet finished. He said yes, and described her work as terrific indie-style music with some smart twists. 'Call Out Your Name' came out on 28 March 2025 — a slow, smoky blues about the residue of a relationship that had ended, written, by her account, in three hours, with Townshend's guitar taking the solos. It was pressed as a Record Store Day seven-inch on 12 April 2025, and her label confirmed the single had been sent to Elton John, who was enthusiastic about it.

The album arrived on 30 May 2025 through V2 Records: This Is How The Future Sounds, ten tracks and under half an hour, covering the mechanics of being in one's twenties, heartbreak, mental health and queer identity. Three of the songs she produced alone in GarageBand, with Jan Schröder, Simon Gitsels, Niels van der Wielen and Radboud Miedema handling the rest; 'Lying Eyes', 'Higher' and 'Bleed' went out as singles around it. Her summary of the result was that it is entirely hers, which is a reasonable claim for a record where the loudest guest is one guitar solo.

Where things stand, September 2026

The touring pattern since the album has been steady club work in the Netherlands rather than a single named tour: Simplon in Groningen on 22 November 2025, Patronaat in Haarlem on 5 December 2025, Merleyn in Nijmegen on 23 December 2025, then Mezz in Breda on 25 January 2026, Café De Amer in Amen on 21 February 2026 and the free café stage at Paard in The Hague on 28 March 2026, with Krugar opening. Her festival summer ended at Hart van Zuid in Hengelo on 5 September 2026.

New material has been released one song at a time. 'GRAVITY' came out during 2026 and a stripped version followed on 28 August 2026, put out with a video and framed as a thank-you to the people who had pushed the original. She took it onto Dutch alternative radio on 31 August 2026, playing it on two acoustic guitars and talking through why she had rebuilt it that way.

The most telling booking of the autumn is not a gig. On 3 October 2026 she leads a masterclass at the first edition of The Hague Guitar Experience, a two-day event at Musicon and Max Guitar priced at €54, alongside André Nieri, Martijn van Agt and Leif de Leeuw — recognition of the instrument rather than the follower count. Beyond that, a single date is currently on sale: 27 November 2026 at Groene Engel in Oss, on a shared bill with CAMP. and XXJULÌA.

What the shows are actually like

The live setup is a four-piece with Lamboo fronting it on guitar and piano, and the venues are the small end of the Dutch circuit — EKKO in Utrecht, Simplon, Patronaat, Mezz — where tickets for the album launch ran to €16 and the Paard café night cost nothing at all. Doors at 19:30 and music at 20:00 is the usual shape, which in practice means one support and a headline set rather than a long multi-band evening.

Support has been chosen rather than inherited. PEER, an alternative rock band regularly compared to Nothing But Thieves, opened the album release at EKKO on 30 May 2025; Wendy Moore opened her first headline show; Krugar, an acoustic-led indie folk-pop project, took the Paard café slot in March 2026. Venues pitching the show lean on the physical side of it and on the pull of the songs' narratives, and the audience she draws is described in terms of Yungblud, Rag'n'Bone Man and Måneskin rather than the children's-TV repertoire that first got her noticed.