Library Card – Peeling an Orange in Just One Go

— this is a pre-order, release date: november 6, 2026
— limited edition bone white vinyl includes high quality art print
— all formats receive a limited edition handmade lyrics booklet
— vinyl and cds are signed

After forming in the summer of 2021, Rotterdam quartet Library Card became an entity transcribing the experiences of four highly different individuals. It unfurls like an aerodynamic noise-punk tempest inside of an hourglass. Library Card often evoke the anxiety of city life; high rise buildings are described like gravestones reflecting our black silhouettes back at us;  the maddening maelstrom of “process, doubt and obsession” calcifying into a self-made sanctuary. But the band offers levity and reprieve at every corner with unexpected stylistic turns: within reversed yearnings of moments yet unlived, or imaginary drives where dreams and memories collude in tender astonishment. 

Library Card wield this urgency to express with a wit and a warmth that’s often absent in post-punk adjacent peers: Mitchell Quitz uses his guitars and effect pedals like a mad painter, Kat Kalkman’s rumbling bass tethers a clockwork of contrasts, and Emre Karayalçin’s skinwork surveys with limber, labyrinthine alertness; their instruments a potent runway for Lot van Teylingen’s expressive wordplay. Within this pact, Library Card offer the full catalog of human experience: dizzying freedoms dressed as disenchanted sonnets, beaming victory laps with extinguished torches, useful limbos between paralysis and possibility.

Library Card’s 2024 debut EP Nothing, Interesting presented a vibrant sprawl in the quartet’s shrewd eclectism: poignant post-rock lamentations (“Local Newspaper”), punk outbursts referencing dead existentialists (“Kierkegaard”), firecracker “love letters to the patriarchy” (“Well, Actually”) and noisy anthems that illustrate the weight of reality against unwavering ideals (“Cognitve Dissonance”). The band’s fresh probing of everyday problems has resonated steadily, earning slots at Dour Festival, Le Guess Who?, SXSW, ESNS, Best Kept Secret, and Left of the Dial, as well as support slots for OSEES, Sports Team, Just Mustard, and Kills Birds.

The band’s debut LP Peeling an Orange in Just One Go, arriving November 6 via AT EASE, could be likened to the adjusting of the camera lens, bringing the foursome’s established craft into a deeper, sharper focus. The album’s title is lifted from a line from the spry “Breakfast of Champions” , a high-wired uprush of despair and “self-imposed naiveté”, as Van Teylingen puts it. “Peeling an orange in one go feels like a useless victory,” they say. “It’s an inconsequential thing, but if you pull it off, you do get this feeling of ‘Oh…nice!”. That sense of unblemished joy is focussed within Karayalçin’s whimsical drumming; its first bars recorded over the studio intercom before the track blasts into full resolution.

The first half of the record leans heavily into Library Card’s angular art punk frenzy; the aptly-titled “Sisyphus” channels a winsome bewilderment about our ability to focus on trivial things amidst tides of global collapse. The album’s lead single “Out Of Context” – complete with rogueish vibraphone touches dubbing the guitar parts – captures a cartoonish alienation of navigating the ‘adultsphere’ as an outsider. “We're all kinds of creative weirdos who have no place in that world at all, so it quickly comes down to putting on a performance,” Van Teylingen says.

On Peeling an Orange in Just One Go Library Card gradually unravels from their wry, free associative songwriting for a more candid view of the anguish festering underneath: a combustion postponed for the sake of inviting its very destructive potential. The gyrating “People Pleaser” spins itself dizzy on platitudes until the music nosedives in pure noise-laden distress – punctuated by Van Teylingen’s primal scream. “When Lot’s scream happens,” says Kalkman, “My entire body screams with them. And everyone in the band feeds their playing into that same spirit.”

The pouncing, prowling “Every Ten Minutes” – referring to the amount of times a femicide occurs per day – delineates the real life horror movie women, non-binary and non-cis people experience day-to-day within the male gaze (‘What if we were believed before we cried for help?’). “Temperance” stretches Library Card’s inner dynamics to thrilling new configurations, channeling the disquieting calm of a Haneke movie scene around Kalkman’s lurching bassline and Karayalçin’s slithering shuffle. The line “There’s a skeleton inside of me” suddenly transmutes from an offbeat stoner thought into something more sinister. 

The queasy trip-hop/slowcore rendered  “One Week of Staring at The Ceiling” injects that snake-bitten feeling of being immobilised yet fully conscious, as jolts of distorted guitars defibrillate its protagonist back into awakening. Recording the album’s atmospheric closer “Dog Barking in the Distance”, Library Card becomes a fully transparent organism, blood and guts on full display, yet receptive to the light surrounding it. It informs this band - and the individals forming it - to a tee.

In their fragmented post-pandemic beginnings, Library Card have pushed their collective energies beyond the easy allure of nihilism, melancholy, conflict and other debilitating states; theirs is a sound forged and overdriven to attain those extra gears beyond the clouds of smoke. On Peeling an Orange in Just One Go, Van Teylingen, Quitz, Kalkman and Karayalçin, these aren’t incidental spells, but an architecture of survival language to charge the monsters head-on. For there are always other things to do on the other side. 

Kalkman: “We don’t feel like a new band anymore, yet this is still our first album. And this album is a collection of songs already in our system, along with some newer songs. And you have to make that puzzle fit in a way that makes sense. That offers quite a challenge, but an exciting one.” “It feels like we graduated as a band in that sense,” Van Teylingen adds. “It’s like coming up from the basement and entering the first floor. You have matured, you know each other better: it’s all happened very organically. In many aspects, it’s been a transformative process.”

Library Card are:

Lot van Teylingen (they/them) - vocals
Mitchell Quitz (he/him)- guitars/effects
Kat Kalkman (they/them) - bass
Emre Karayalçin (they/them) – drums/percussion