Zea – In In Lichem Fol Beloften

(Makkum Records)

Vinyl + Book | CD + Book | DL available here

November 7 2025

Zea aka Arnold de Boer of The Ex, draws on his roots with this set of brilliantly crafted songs, backed by a Frisian marching band.

There’s more than one way to tell a story. An old adage, but certainly fitting for the new release from The Ex frontman Arnold de Boer, aka Zea. In Lichem Fol Beloften, (A Body Filled With Promises) is a set of poetic observations presented as brilliantly crafted songs: all backed by a killer band and enhanced by a wider soundscape courtesy of his dad’s marching band, Hallelujah Makkum.

Arnold De Boer reminds this writer more and more of some wandering mediaeval preacher, forever popping up to offer us whatever sonic charms and fancies he collects on the road. His music this past thirty years has always drawn on these wanderings: we can point to his strong and ongoing ties with musicians in Congo, Ghana, or Ethiopia. In Lichem Fol Beloften draws its inspiration from the two poles of his life in the Netherlands: his Frisian roots and his Amsterdam home.

A lot of the music here is quiet and somewhat reflective in pitch, with the words doing the heavy lifting. On the opening – and title – track de Boer also shares the bill with Frisian poet, Tsead Bruijna. Those who want to hear the rich, rolling vowels of the Frisian language can get a crash course from the off. (You can also read along with the booklet, handily printed in Frisian, Dutch and English and see how a language literally travels over water.) With his quieter music, De Boer keeps playing one killer trick, that of repeating a word or phrase and allowing the hypnotic power of these repetitions to guide the song. You hear this on the second track, ‘De Tút Yn de Betonnen Wolken’ and its follow up, the mournful ‘Pine en Tijd – 1’. You hear it too in the beautiful if melancholy ballad, ‘Ik Tel Dyn Bonken Op’ that is one of the album’s highlights.

As the album progresses, the ghostly scrape of Harlad Austbo’s cello or the keening, sometimes birdlike notes of Xavier Charles’s cello add colour and shape to these heartfelt songs. Listen to ‘De Dea’, or album closer, the affective ‘Suze Nane Poppe’ for proof. A note to be made, too, here, for Ineke Duivenvoorde’s beautifully responsive drumming, which has a narrative sensitivity to it and creates space in thin air with the lightest of taps.

Despite that, the restless, inquisitive nature of De Boer’s worldview, which gave The Ex a new breath of air when he joined in the mid noughties, runs through this record like marrow in a bone. Backed up by his dad’s Frisian marching band, some of the tracks are borderline transcendent, regardless of subject matter. ‘The Fûgel’ (The Bird) is one, where the stomp and tramp of the marching band really kicks in. The band’s drums propel the all-too-short ‘Pine en Tijd – II’ into a Morricone soundtrack of sorts: albeit with a true Frisian sense of propriety. ‘Makkum’ is another magic fusion: the moment (during De Boer’s listing of the streets in the Frisian town of Makkum) when the triangle comes in is utter magic and yes, when did you ever read that in a rock review?

I have long been a believer that language doesn’t really matter in a record as long as you can feel the singer’s presence, or at least divine some feeling of connection in the way the words reach the listener. Misinterpretation is to be encouraged.

More about Zea can be found here. Zea’s site is here.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.