Baby Berserk

Baby Berserk announce new album Psycho Dance Sleaze out 19th March via Les Disques Bongo Joe & Mothland and share first single/video "French Manicure".

Today Amsterdam trio Baby Berserk announce new album Psycho Dance Sleaze, out 19th March via Les Disques Bongo Joe & Mothland, blending punk, garage rock and electronic club culture into their own unpredictable universe. The band are sharing the first single from the record, "French Manicure".

On "French Manicure" the band dives into the playful mystery of an unexpected encounter. Built around the intrigue of an anonymous phone conversation, the song captures the excitement of connecting with someone you know absolutely nothing about. Identities remain hidden, intentions are unclear, and the pleasure lies precisely in that uncertainty. Flirting with anonymity, curiosity and the thrill of the unknown, Baby Berserk turn an ordinary exchange into a game of seduction where imagination takes over and anything seems possible.

Born at the intersection of punk, fashion and club culture, Amsterdam trio Baby Berserk have spent the past few years building a world entirely of their own. A world where raw guitars collide with drum machines, where glamour meets chaos, and where the boundaries between the dancefloor, the stage and the runway are constantly blurred. With their third album, Psycho Dance Sleaze, released jointly by Les Disques Bongo Joe and Mothland, Lieselot Elzinga, Eva Wijnbergen and Mano Hollestelle take this vision further than ever before. Drawing on their shared roots in Amsterdam’s punk and garage scenes, the band reconnects with the visceral energy of live instrumentation while pushing deeper into the electronic territory that has defined their sound.

Baby Berserk’s story began during the Covid pandemic, in a shared Amsterdam studio where music and fashion were already feeding into one another. While Mano Hollestelle was producing music, fashion designer Lieselot Elzinga was working on her clothing collections. During a photoshoot, Mano noticed how the music playing in the studio was transforming the atmosphere.

He invited Lieselot to try recording vocals over a track he was working on. Despite having never sung before, she spontaneously improvised a vocal performance that would become the foundation of the band’s first single, What I Mean. Joined by Eva Wijnbergen, the three longtime friends, who had known each other since high school, began shaping a project in which music, visual identity and performance would become inseparable.

From their first singles on Bongo Joe, What I Mean / Sleepless in 2020 and Toxic Kisses / Wartimein 2022, to their debut album Baby’s Berserk on Toy Tonics in 2023 and its follow-up Slightly Hysterical Girls With Pearls on Bongo Joe in 2024, the trio gradually developed a distinctive musical language.

Their sound brought together the urgency of punk, the synthetic textures of new wave, the infectious rhythms of early house and the hedonistic spirit of 1990s club culture. Along the way, their reputation as a live act has grown considerably.

From European stages at ESNS, The Great Escape, Dour and Reeperbahn to performances in Canada, the band has earned recognition for shows that are as unpredictable as they are exhilarating. Loud, sweaty, theatrical and occasionally absurd, their concerts thrive on the tension between tightly constructed dance music and the possibility that everything might fall apart at any moment.

It is precisely this experience of performing live that lies at the heart of Psycho Dance Sleaze. After years of exploring the possibilities of electronic production, the band found themselves increasingly drawn back to the sounds and instruments that had shaped their musical upbringing.

All three members emerged from Amsterdam’s punk and garage scene, and Baby Berserk was their first project rooted primarily in electronic music. Touring reminded them of the particular excitement generated by live guitars, drums and the physical interaction between musicians on stage.

Rather than abandoning their electronic identity, they set out to bring these elements together, searching for a balance between the rawness of garage rock and the rhythmic drive of club music. The influence of bands such as The Stone Roses, Beastie Boys, PILL and The Prodigy runs through this approach.

But the album’s musical roots reach even further back. Beneath its electronic pulse lies a fascination with the primal energy of 1950s rock’n’roll, a sound that played an important role in the members’ formative years. Growing up in Amsterdam, where rockabilly culture was part of their teenage environment, they absorbed the music of Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins alongside the punk and garage records that would later shape their musical identities.

Recorded in Mano Hollestelle’s Amsterdam studio, with Mano handling the instrumentation, production and mixing, and Lieselot and Eva contributing their distinctive vocal performances, the album reflects a collective desire to reconnect with the foundations of their sound while continuing to move forward.

Despite its provocative title, Psycho Dance Sleaze is not simply an exercise in excess. Across the record, Baby Berserk explore a surprisingly broad emotional landscape, moving between obsession, desire, frustration, vulnerability and liberation, often approaching these subjects through humour and surreal imagery. On Stuck in Here, an ambitious goldfish dreams of escaping the limitations of its bowl, convinced that nothing can stand between it and a glorious future. Psychoturns romantic devotion into something darker, exploring the unsettling territory where love becomes obsession. French Manicure captures the intrigue of an anonymous telephone conversation, while Sipping On follows a moment of curiosity and attraction across a hotel bar. Elsewhere, No Fun confronts the contradictory emotions that accompany the end of a relationship or a chapter in life, when fear and freedom arrive together.

Other songs reveal a more introspective side of the band. On Painted Lines, makeup becomes both armour and expression, a way of hiding from the world while simultaneously demanding to be seen. Smart Girls reflects on the resourcefulness that emerges from struggle, suggesting that the need to adapt, resist and survive can become a powerful source of creativity. These themes sit alongside the unapologetic self-determination of You Gotta Enjoy and the burning emotional intensity of I Hate You, a reinterpretation of the song by 1960s garage band The Monks. Baby Berserk embrace contradiction as a creative force: confidence and insecurity, pleasure and anxiety, humour and seriousness coexist without the need to resolve one another.

Fashion remains an equally essential part of this universe. For Baby Berserk, clothing, music and performance have never existed as separate disciplines. Lieselot Elzinga’s background as a fashion designer, creating pieces for international artists while developing her own label, has helped shape a visual language in which exaggerated silhouettes, theatrical gestures and an irreverent attitude become extensions of the music itself.

The band’s aesthetic draws inspiration from figures such as Vivienne Westwood, Leigh Bowery, Divine and Keith Flint, artists and performers who understood the power of appearance as a form of expression and provocation. This relationship between sound and image takes on a new dimension through their ongoing collaboration with Scottish fashion designer Charles Jeffrey, founder and creative director of LOVERBOY. The band invited him to create the cover artwork for Psycho Dance Sleaze.

Ultimately, Psycho Dance Sleaze captures Baby Berserk at a moment of transformation. Having established themselves through a series of records and an increasingly international live presence, the trio now turn towards their own musical history to imagine what comes next. Their return to garage, punk and rock’n’roll is not a retreat from the dancefloor, but a way of expanding its possibilities. Across its shifting moods, restless rhythms and eccentric narratives, the album celebrates the freedom to move between worlds without belonging entirely to any of them. More than a genre or an aesthetic, Psycho Dance Sleaze is Baby Berserk’s way of approaching music: instinctive, irreverent, unpredictable and driven by the belief that the most exciting things happen when different worlds collide.

Photo credit: Eneko Caos