Amsterdam indie veterans Pip Blom and Willem Smit have finally made it official. After a decade of musical flirtation, they've launched Long Fling – a project that sounds exactly like what you'd expect when two of the Netherlands' most interesting songwriters stop pretending they're not meant to collaborate.

Their debut single "Flung" dropped today, and it's a proper kraut-rock banger built around what Willem calls a "spanky" guitar that was literally "impossible to tune and beyond repair." Sometimes the best music comes from broken instruments.

Spanky is certainly one word for it... It's like eating a hard sweet with goo in the middle. It requires a certain level of trust to endure it, and it turns out to be alright in the end.

Check it out here

The track features Willem's trademark DIY drum sounds – made by slapping a microphone against everything from cupboards to floors before digital processing. It's raw but polished, the kind of contradiction that makes indie music worth caring about.

"One of the easiest songs on the record to write," Willem explains, though easy doesn't mean simple. The synths venture into more dissonant territory than either artist's main projects would dare, creating something genuinely fresh.

Their self-titled debut album arrives 3rd October, promising "charming, offbeat guitar and drum machine anthems about socks, shoes, and staying home." Finally, songs that match our actual lives rather than some aspirational nonsense.

This isn't your typical duet situation. No saccharine harmonies or predictable call-and-response vocals. Instead, Pip and Willem trade lines over minimal arrangements that feel like intimate conversations you're lucky to overhear.

"We'd never done everything including the mixing ourselves before," Pip admits. "We were okay with the idea that the record didn't need to be super polished or perfect." When they asked their respective fathers whether the album sounded more like a Willem or Pip record, both dads said the other's name. That's proper collaboration.

Long Fling made their surprise live debut in May at Amsterdam's London Calling Festival and have been road-testing material across European festivals, including End of the Road. Their UK tour kicks off in October with dates in Brighton, London's Lexington, and Manchester.

Live, they expand to a five-piece with Sal Rubinstein, Darek Mercks, and Tender Blom, transforming these intimate bedroom recordings into proper rock anthems.

After ten years of creative tension evolving into natural flow, Long Fling feels less like a side project and more like an inevitability. Sometimes the best relationships take time to figure themselves out.