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A2

Stiekem

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 47 study entries at A2: 12 Dutch words, 6 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 6 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

NLENESITFRPTDE
avondeveningtarde, nocheserasoirnoiteAbend
blikkenglances, looksmiradassguardiregardsolharesBlicke, Ausdrücke

This card holds 10 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

NLENESIT

What this song teaches you

Level · A2

Vocabulary words
12
Adjectives
6
Word combos
4
Expressions
10
Verb forms
29
Quiz questions
35

More Dutch songs at this level

  • Rood — Marco Borsato (2006)A2+
  • Leef — André Hazes Jr. (2015)A2-
  • Zoutelande — BLØF ft. Geike Arnaert (2017)A2+
  • Ik leef niet meer voor jou — Marco Borsato (1996)A2+

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?

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FR
PT
DE
dodelijkdeadlymortalmortalemortelmortaltödlich

This card holds 5 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

NLENESITFRPTDE
aan te rakento touchtocartoccaretouchertocarberühren
benI amestoysonoje suisestouich bin
bentyou areeresseitu esésdu bist
blijfI keep onsigocontinuoje continuecontinuoich mache weiter
brandI burnme quemomi brucioje me brûlequeimo-meich brenne
delento sharecompartircondividerepartagerpartilharteilen
durento lastdurarduraredurerdurardauern
eindigtendsterminafiniscefinitacabaendet
ga doodI am dyingme mueromuoioje meursmorroich sterbe

This card holds 20 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

The context made all of that considerably less abstract. Maan and Karel Gerlach had begun a relationship in August 2022, a few months before the release, and the Dutch gossip press had spent the autumn speculating about it. The video, directed by Véras Fawaz and released on the same day as the single, leans straight into that: it is a satire of tabloid television and of the online «juice channels» that had made the couple’s private life into content, with Maan cast as a femme fatale hunting the reporters who had been hunting her. A song about hiding, released by two people who had just stopped hiding, promoted with a video about the people who would not let them hide — it is hard to design a better launch.

For someone learning Dutch, «Stiekem» is unusually generous material, because it is sung in the register people actually speak in rather than the tidy Dutch of textbooks. Three things dominate. The first is contraction: the definite article «het» is shortened to «’t», the possessive «mijn» becomes «m’n», and the imperative of «houden» loses its final consonant. These are not errors — they are how the language sounds at conversational speed, and a learner who has never met them will simply not hear the words. The second is the separable verb, which is the feature of Dutch grammar with no equivalent in Spanish, Italian, French or Portuguese: verbs like «aanraken», «doorgeven», «opleven», «doodgaan», «vasthouden» and «uitschreeuwen» split in two in a main clause, with the prefix thrown to the end of the sentence, and when «te» is involved it slots in between the two halves. The third is word order in subordinate clauses, where the verb moves to the end — the song offers several clean examples with «dat», «zonder dat» and «voordat». On top of that there is a modal in almost every line, a conditional built with «zou», and two idioms worth owning: one for something spreading uncontrollably and one for a situation getting out of hand.

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).

Charts & streaming

«Stiekem» never reached number one in the Dutch Top 40, and that is precisely what makes its record so strange. It peaked at number two and stayed there for nine separate weeks spread across the end of 2022 and the whole of 2023, refusing to move in either direction. On the Single Top 100, the other national chart, it did reach number one.

On 13 May 2023 the Dutch Top 40 announced that, measured by the points a song accumulates from its weekly positions, «Stiekem» had become the biggest Dutch-language hit in the history of the list: 982 points over 26 weeks on the chart. It passed «Ik neem je mee» by Gers Pardoel, which had held the record with 975 points for eleven years, and which had in turn ended a reign of forty-one years by Corry & De Rekels. In total the single spent 32 weeks in the Top 40.

Abroad it reached number two on the Ultratop 50 in Flanders, and the year-end tables confirm how long it lasted: number five in the Dutch Top 40 for 2023, number two on the Single Top 100 for the same year, and number six in Flanders. It also entered the NPO Radio 2 Top 2000 at the end of 2023, at position 180.

The single was certified platinum in the Netherlands and gold in Belgium, and it passed one hundred million streams on Spotify. It had been made both 3FM Megahit and Qmusic Alarmschijf in November 2022, the two biggest radio pushes available in the country, and in 2023 it took the Edison Awards for both Song of the Year and Video of the Year.