Stiekem

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?