Pias news – dEUS returns with ‘keptman’
RETURN WITH 'KEPTMAN'
Keptman - song and lyrics by dEUS | Spotify

"An ambiguously heartfelt ode to dependence and the almost narcotic attraction to beautiful stuff."
That's dEUS talking about Keptman, their first new music since 2023's critically acclaimed How To Replace It. It's an appropriately slippery description for a band that has spent more than three decades turning beautiful things into slightly dangerous ones.

The song began life as a dictaphone demo, written in Portugal and eventually brought back to Antwerp. Even the title happened by accident. Engineer João Portela simply ignored the space between the two words. Some mistakes, as it turns out, are worth keeping.
Keptman arrives hot on the heels of dEUS' Worst Case vs In a Bar tour, a celebratory trip back into the band's early catalogue that concluded with an exhilarating show in Reykjavík earlier this month. But rather than leaving them trapped in the past, the tour seems to have done the opposite. It has pushed dEUS deeper into the present and straight into the studio.
For much of the past year, the band immersed themselves in songs that had been gathering dust for decades. Some were 30 years old; some had never been played live at all. Night after night, the band rediscovered the loose, abrasive and occasionally unruly energy of Worst Case Scenario and In a Bar, Under the Sea. Inevitably, some of that electricity followed them home.

It can be heard all over Keptman.
A crooked guitar riff loops like a bad thought you can't quite shake. Tom Barman delivers his lines with a loose-limbed swagger, somewhere between conversational and confrontational. Klaas Janzoons and new guitarist Simen Følstad pile up layers of noise and countermelodies, while Stéphane Misseghers and Alan Gevaert provide the track with a steady, insistent pulse. Everything keeps tightening until the song erupts into a climax with, appropriately enough, a certain smell of roses.

It's immediate. It's infectious and it's slightly wonky around the edges.
In other words, it sounds like dEUS.
And there's a reason that sound has travelled so far...

Formed in Antwerp in 1991, dEUS were never simply a Belgian band that happened to break internationally. From the release of Worst Case Scenario in 1994, they became part of a broader European alternative-rock conversation, earning critical acclaim and building a following well beyond Belgium. Their music travelled across borders at a time when international success for a Belgian guitar band was far from guaranteed.
Albums such as In a Bar, Under the Sea, The Ideal Crash, Pocket Revolution and Vantage Point expanded that reach, while relentless touring turned dEUS into a formidable live act across Europe and beyond. Over the years, they have played major European venues and festivals and cultivated an audience that has followed them through multiple incarnations of the alternative-rock landscape.

The remarkable thing is not simply that dEUS have survived for more than 35 years. It's that their songs have continued to feel slightly out of place and therefore strangely at home wherever they are played.
Their international career was built without sanding down the eccentricities that made the band interesting in the first place. dEUS have always been comfortable somewhere between art rock and guitar rock, melody and dissonance, elegance and mess. They can write a beautiful song and then spend the next three minutes deliberately making it uncomfortable.
The recent catalogue tour offered a reminder of exactly that. Songs written in the early 1990s suddenly sounded less like museum pieces than raw material. And when the band returned to Vantage Point Studios in Antwerp to start work on a new record, that renewed sense of freedom came with them. The result is an album that is still unnamed but already has a pulse of its own.
Keptman is the first glimpse: It's a song about dependence and desire, about the things we know we probably shouldn't want quite so badly and wanting them anyway. An ambiguously heartfelt ode, perhaps, to the almost narcotic attraction of beautiful stuff. Oh, and it's a total banger!