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Stiekem — Maan: Dutch vocabulary & story · Verbomatico

Stiekem

by Maan ft. Goldband

Language: Dutch
Released: 2022
Genre: nederpop
Level: A2
Difficulty score: 595
Duration: 3:23

How to study this song

The card for “Stiekem” is built from 50 study entries at A2: 12 Dutch words, 9 adjectives and 29 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: avond and blikken are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 29 distinct forms against 9 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
avond	evening	tarde, noche	sera	soir	noite	Abend

Adjectives

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
dodelijk	deadly	mortal	mortale	mortel	mortal	tödlich

Verb forms

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
aan te raken	to touch	tocar	toccare	toucher	tocar	berühren

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

Vocabulary words: 12
Adjectives: 9
Word combos: 4
Expressions: 10
Verb forms: 29
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Stiekem» is the Dutch word for «secretly», and it is also the record that rewrote the history of the Dutch charts. Released on 4 November 2022 on the 8ball Music label, the song brings together two very different corners of Dutch pop: Maan, a polished singer who came out of prime-time television, and Goldband, a scruffy, synth-driven trio from The Hague that had spent three years building a reputation as the most unpredictable live act in the country. The track runs just under three and a half minutes, and it was added to a reissue of Maan’s second studio album, «Leven», which had appeared a few weeks earlier.

Maan de Steenwinkel was born in Utrecht in February 1997 and grew up in Bergen, a small town on the North Holland coast. She won the sixth season of The Voice of Holland in January 2016, mentored by Marco Borsato, and then did something no previous winner of the programme had managed: she turned a television victory into a durable pop career. In 2019 «Hij is van mij» made her the first winner of the show to reach number one in the Dutch Top 40, and «Blijven slapen», a duet with the rapper Snelle, repeated the feat in 2021. By the time «Stiekem» appeared she was no longer a talent-show graduate but one of the most reliable hitmakers singing in her own language.

Goldband came from the opposite direction. Boaz Kok, Karel Gerlach and Milo Driessen formed the group in The Hague in 2019, working with the producer Wieger Hoogendorp. The name is borrowed from a brand of stucco plaster: their fathers were plasterers, and so were they before the music took over. That background is audible in the way they write. Their songs are blunt, funny, slightly out of tune on purpose, and they talk about money problems, break-ups and nights out in the plain vocabulary people actually use. Their second album, «Betaalbare Romantiek» — «affordable romance» — came out in 2021, and their performance at the Lowlands festival in the summer of 2022 was widely described as the best set of that edition. Within weeks their older singles were climbing charts they had never entered before.

The song itself is a small drama about wanting someone you are not supposed to want in public. The narrator is in a crowded room, close enough to see the other person and far too watched to do anything about it, so the whole affair is conducted with glances. It is a very modern kind of love song: the tension does not come from distance but from surveillance, from the certainty that somebody will notice. The chorus turns that into something almost euphoric — a night that belongs to the two of them, and the conviction that nobody is going to find out — while the second half of the song admits how badly this is likely to end. The last section drops the game entirely and asks a straight question: when does this stop being a secret?

Did you know?

Maan and Karel Gerlach of Goldband became a couple in August 2022, three months before the single appeared. The Dutch gossip press had already published the story, so a song called «secretly» arrived with its own ready-made joke attached, and the two artists used it rather than denying it.

The music video, directed by Véras Fawaz and released on 4 November 2022 alongside the song, is a parody of celebrity television and of the online gossip channels that had exposed the relationship. It won the #Video Award for best music video in December 2022 and the Edison for Video of the Year in 2023, while the song itself took the Edison for Song of the Year.

Goldband are named after a brand of stucco plaster. The three members worked as plasterers in The Hague before the band existed, following their fathers into the trade, and they have kept the working-class bluntness of that world in their lyrics.

The collaboration was possible because Goldband had just had the summer of their lives. Their set at the Lowlands festival in August 2022 was widely voted the best of the edition, and their earlier single «Noodgeval» became the highest new entry that year in the Top 2000, the enormous end-of-year poll broadcast by NPO Radio 2.

Six people share the writing credit: Maan de Steenwinkel, the three members of Goldband, the producer Wieger Hoogendorp and Arno Krabman. Hoogendorp and Krabman also produced the recording, which is built on a bright synthesiser figure rather than on guitars.

The title itself is a useful piece of Dutch. «Stiekem» works as an adverb and as an adjective, and it carries a note of mischief that «secretly» in English does not quite have: it is the word for doing something behind someone’s back, with a small smile.

Filmmaker Olivier S. Garcia followed Goldband for seven years, and the resulting documentary «Goldband: tot we breken» premiered in The Hague in September 2025, by which time the trio had released a third album, «Samen Tegen Elkaar» (2024).