On November 1, 2024 Thijs Boontjes' long-awaited second album, entitled Dancing Beans (label: Excelsior Recordings). On the successor to the debut album No More Eighteen (2019) Thijs reveals himself as an activist, a bon vivant, and a partner who sometimes messes things up. The new cabinet is criticized in a protest song. Fiasco (Embarrassing, Embarrassing) and in Night porter he laments the increasing xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance in our society. Even under the most dire circumstances, Dancing Boontjes manages to maintain a spirit of optimism, sometimes with a bittersweet drink ( Campari Soda ) in hand, as a weapon against the deep-seated Calvinist flatness of our country. Thijs Boontjes, like no other, gives words and context to the phenomenon of "human clumsiness," and he doesn't overdo it. Musically, the album moves via rock 'n' roll, Italo, and the occasional punk outburst back to its Nederpop roots, which are evident throughout.
The album title refers to his family's car garage in Schagen, North Holland, which was occasionally transformed into a 'bar dance hall' in the post-war years. Whenever the itch started, the showroom was transformed into a dance floor, and a newspaper ad announced that Dancing Boontjes had reopened. The nostalgia of that place, which Thijs himself only knows from old photos and stories, inspired the album. Thijs: "I love glory, especially when it's faded. It can look glamorous, but only with cracks in the walls and sun-faded curtains that haven't been drawn in years." Substantively, the image of that worn-out bar symbolizes a world where everyone's true nature ultimately emerges. With Dancing Boontjes, Thijs creates his own nocturnal universe where the unusual seems perfectly normal and vice versa, where you can dance away both large-scale suffering and everyday life as if no one is watching.
