Weval - CHOROPHOBIA (2025) Hi-Res

The duo on their fourth album: “We were afraid of making a dance tune.” CHOROPHOBIA means fear of dancing, something that Dutch duo Weval admit to suffering from when they were younger. But it’s an anxiety that Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers conquered for the release of their fourth album, the follow-up to 2023’s Remember.

“We said to each other, ‘Let’s make a dance record,’” Scholte Albers tells Apple Music. “Before, we’d never dared do it and always made ‘listening’ records. But we got a lot of energy from the idea and the creative process became way more fluid.”

It’s definitely a dance record, with 11 tracks that veer from “MOVEMENT”, which evokes the spirit of 3 am at a 1990 rave, to the synth-heavy hypnotiser “HEAD FIRST”, before smashing everyone’s resolve to sit down with the KILIMANJARO-featuring wig-out “OPEN UP THAT DOOR”.

“We were always afraid of making a dance tune, and we wanted to see if we could change up the process,” says Coolen. “All our previous records were made with unlimited time and we loved that, but instead of looking at a track for three years, working on it almost every month to see if it gets any better, we found an urgency in our writing. For the first record [2016’s Weval], we only had one synthesiser and now we have so many tools and friends and vocalists to reach out to.”

The sense of urgency was, in part, brought about by Scholte Albers’ packed schedule. While making the album, he was also writing, directing and scoring his first feature film, Straf, which he describes as “dark, but full-on comedy”. As if that wasn’t enough, they directed the video for “OPEN UP THAT DOOR” themselves. “I think that week was super crazy because we had to finish the record on Monday, produce the music video and shoot it on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we played fabric in London,” says Scholte Albers.