Looking back on 2011 proves we had a busy year. We did around 110 shows, including the support for Boysetsfire on their reunion tour, for Rise Against on their biggest German show to date, and for De Heideroosjes on their farewell tour. 2011 brought us to new places like Russia, Greece, Hungary and Scotland, and saw us play at Eurosonic/Noorderslag, Riez Open Air and the Jupiter Singfest for the first time. The year started with our van passing the 500.000 km mark, and we ended the year with a steady 545.000 on the meter. This does not even include our trips to Russia and Greece, which we did by plane.

We sure made a lot of miles in 2011, literally and figuratively. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped make this possible: promoters, people coming to the shows, helping hands on tour, and in special Sylvia and Jacho at Destiny, Glenn and Sandro at Mighty Vision, Vladimir and Sergej at Play It Loud, Apostolis at WAK, Etjen at Just Like Your Mom for always thinking along and our steady tour-help Thomas.

Something we are neither proud nor ashamed of: this year we played with 4 different bass players (thank you Tom, Tim and stand-in Koen!), resulting in Glen as our steady new bass player. In 2011 we also released our first ever music video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j0PJpUmU50

2012

While we can look back happily on a busy and hectic 2011, we prefer to look forward and focus on what is yet to come. Here’s what we have planned for 2012 so far. More to come!

New Website

On January 1st we launched our new website, something we’ve been looking forward to for a while. If you want to know what is going on with us, listen to our albums, check our tour dates or just get in touch, our website is the most trustworthy place to go. Subscribe yourself to its feed and be up to date all the time.

Brazil

More new territory: On February 1st our latest album “Start From Scratch!” will be released in South America through Undermusic Records (Mute, Forus, End of Pipe). South America has been on our radar for a long time now, and we’re very glad to get our music out there. A South American tour will follow.

Upcoming shows

In the first months of the new year we will be playing in Germany a lot. These are our upcoming shows:

JAN 11 GER Münster, Lorenz Sud
JAN 12 GER Aachen, Headquarter
JAN 14 GER Lindern, Teestube
JAN 16 GER Mainz, Kulturcafe
JAN 25 GER Frankfurt, 11er
JAN 26 GER München, Glockenbachwerkstatt. w/ Grizzly Tours
JAN 27 AUT Innsbruck, PMK. w/ 7 Years Bad Luck
JAN 28 GER Regensburg, Alte Mälzerei. w/ Glorious Thieves, Red Button
JAN 29 AVAILABLE!
FEB 15 AVAILABLE!
FEB 16 GER Saale (Halle), VL Ludwigstrasse
FEB 17 GER Kamen, JKC
FEB 18 GER Braunschweig, B 58
MAR 3 NL Zeist, De Peppel. w/ The Living Daylights, Sidewalk, Life’s Too Short For Us
APR 14 GER Köwerich (Trier), Rock im Kabuff (Jugendheim). w/ Finding Faith, Corman, A Hurricane’s Revenge

Not close enough? Want to book us in your city? Email us! For an always updated tour-schedule, check out the tour section.

New album

Maybe the most exciting news for 2012 is that we will be working on a new album. We are currently writing new songs and playing them into shape. Recordings will follow next winter the soonest. We’ll be playing these new songs on stage too, so come hear for yourself at a show and let us know if you like it!

Support

If you want us to stay an active, recording band in 2012 please support us through our merch and albums available at our webshop. Other ways to make the world go round for an independent band: follow us on Facebook, Twitter or spread the word by mouth about all our music on http://music.antillectual.com (for free or pay-what-you-like). Much appreciated!

Thanks a lot for bearing with us in the past year. See you on the road in 2012!

- Willem, Glen and Riekus

For all you facebook likers: we’ve noticed that you really enjoy liking and commenting on our updates. So we decided to give our own site a little facebook flavor. From now on, you can easily leave comments on our site with your facebook account. Just hit the blue “connect” button below any post, and you’re logged in to our site through facebook. No need to leave an email adress, and don’t worry: we don’t collect any private information. Also, when you comment on our updates on facebook, your comment will be added to our site. Hope you “like” it! As always, we are open to your suggestions how we can make this work even better.

And last but not least: the new record. We still can’t give you a releasedate, but please rest assured that we are working our asses off behind the scenes to make this our best release to date. And we’re cooking up some spicy plans to introduce our new songs and lyrics to the outside world that is you.

Now go out and catch some sun!

- NEW bass player
- NEW tours

NEW tours
Tom has been working hard to learn our set and the newly written songs. To get both our new bass player and the new songs kicked into perfect shape we planned a run of shows close to home:

Nov 21 NL Sevenum, OJC Walhalla w/ The Real Danger, This Is Cowboy Poetry
Nov 28 NL Breda, Kraakkroeg Voorerf Benefiet Klimaat Actie Kamp. w/ Blame Coca Cola, Rat Label
Dec 4 Bel Antwerpen, de Koevoet w/ Kingterror, Bitedown, GBO
Dec 5 NL Tilburg, Little Devil Shield recordings 5 year anniversary party. w/ Smash the Statues, The Real Danger, Argetti
Dec 19 NL Emmen, Huize Spoorloos w/ Barley Wine
Dec 24 NL Meppel, Cafe Clouso Xodus Kerstpunk. w/ Smash the Statues, Ravens, Omission, The Hunger, The Arrangement, Knekelput
Jan 16 NL Barneveld, Villa / Stedsj
Jan 23 NL Nijmegen, De Onderbroek Yvo & Smash the Statues Farewell show w/ Smash the Statues, In-sane, The Acoustic Alarm

After that period we embark on a European tour and record the new album. Below you find the tour schedule. As you can see we are still in need of shows. Please help us out if you can!

Jan 29 Fr Valenciennes, Available
Jan 30 Fr Lyon, Available
Jan 31 Fr Toulouse, Les Pavillons Sauvages w/ Ivan Rebroff’s Armpits, Messieurs de Fursac
Feb 1 Sp Barcelona, Available
Feb 2 Sp Zaragoza, Available
Feb 3 Sp Madrid, Sala Barracudas
Feb 4 Sp Burgos, TBC
Feb 5 Por Lisboa, Available
Feb 6 Por Porto, Available
Feb 7 Sp Vigo, Available (or Por)
Feb 8 Sp Giyon / Oviedo, Available (or Por)
Feb 9 Sp Bilbao, Available (or Fr)
Feb 10 Sp San Sebastian, Available (or Fr)
Feb 11 Fr Bayonne, TBC
Feb 12 Fr La Rochelle, La Barbarella
Feb 13 Fr Paris, Available
Feb 14 Fr Lille, La Chimère

NEW merch and web shop
Since we are almost out of shirts, patches and zippers and we have new touring plans we ordered some new merch. For the first time we will be doing girly zippers. Don’t let us down girls! If you pre-order our news designs you will get 2 free extra posters, 2 buttons, 2 stickers and 4 samplers, not a bad deal I assure you. Check out the designs and let us know what you think. Zippers come in 2 fancy colors, shirts and girlies in 3 colors.

In case this didn’t lead you to our site yet, please reconsider, since we have a completely new merch store, which makes it even easier to get what you want. Those of you privileged to receive this newsletter can also just reply and place your order.

That’s it for now. Because of the winter people are looking for HOT stuff. And we’ve heard twitter and facebook are HOT. So if you want us to feel appreciated interact with us on Facebook and Twitter.

In the mean time Riekus has been busy updating this site and improving what was not perfect yet, and now it all is! You can search this site through the search field on the top right, and some more social networks have been added next to it, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, PureVolume, you know the drill. From now on Facebook.com/antillectual is the direct link to our page over there, by the way.

Besides that we updated the merch section and took out what wasn’t available anymore and put in the new EP. Get it while it’s still hot and pink! We also have some samplers (for instance the 15 years AFA compilation) which aren’t featured. Email us if you’re interested, we’ll throw in some nice goodies like stickers and posters.

And last the interview we did in Mülheim in March is online at Get Addicted. There’s also a live video at the same site with a new song.

Let us know if you can help us out with a show for one of our upcoming tours! B-bye!

Furthermore we are happy to announce a tour with our European political punker colleagues of Rentokill! Check the shows section for when and where exactly. A nice package to have an enjoyable evening with I presume. On top of that Tom from Smash the Statues will be joining us on the road despite his here and there somewhat peculiar taste in music. Kidding, we love him. And not only for coming on tour with us. We are still in need of one (1!) show, let us know if you want to help us out.

Today we also received our new and acoustic “Pull the Plug” 7″. In case you want to order one let us know. It costs 5 euro and contains four (4!) songs. And we’re extremely happy with the PINK result. More info will follow soon in our merch section. You can listen to a song on our myspace page.

In the mean time we keep adding more and more “local” shows in between our busy touring schedule. Check the shows section for those and let us know if you want us to play your metropole too. More (+) news soon!

At this very moment we're changing this very website from its very server, so there might be a chance that emails get stuck in between. If so, please resend your emails to antillectual@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE: stuff should be working again. If you ever find the shows page to be empty, drop riekus a line at riekus at antillectual dot com. 

And for some reason it slipped through our fingers, but from now on you can find all our lyrics on this website. Look here for Testimony lyrics and here for Silencing Civilization lyrics. If it's written it's true! We also added the USA tour shirt we brought home to the merch section.

Furthermore we expanded our online hegemony through creating both a Twitter account and Last.fm group. Click on them to find out what is what and sign up or join if you feel like it. They are both still pretty much in a starting phase, so feel free to fire them up.

That's it. Hope to see you on the UK tour we're leaving for in exactly 1 week.

First of all, if you happen to have/find reviews, pictures, videos, whatever from our USA tour, please send them or a link to us. We like to keep track and collect a lot of souvenirs this way. A written tour report and the last episode of the tour video report are to come.

For the Americans that are looking for ways to order our merch cheaper than from us (shipping costs and stuff) check out Jump Start Records for the Testimony LP. For the CD/LP of Silencing Civilization and the Testimony CD get in touch with Square of Opposition Records. He is more up to date with his email than with his website. Don't you worry. Square of Opposition also has some left over T-shirts from our USA tour up for sale. Soon they will be for sale through this website too. About that; we sold out some old shirt designs and updated this on the merch section. The remastered Silencing Civilization CDs and LPs are available for ordering.

We also found some new reviews of Testimony in German at Waste of Mind fanzine and Blueprint Fanzine, in English in Can You See the Sunset, Punktastic. On top of that the German zine Ox did an interview with us. You can find the online version here. Soon there will be an interview on ipunk.cz and Last Hours. As if we wouldn't let you know.

Phil from Black Numbers Records (Static Radio, Purpose, Rock,star) asked us if we would like to participate in a Kid Dynamite tribute "Carry the torch" they are releasing together with Copper Lung Records and Get Outta Town Records. And of course, we're honoured. There's a list of already confirmed other bands which is quite exciting. So next weekend we'll be recording Kid Dynamite's "Wrist rocket" and perhaps some demos for our own new songs. If there's enough time though.

For now we hope to see you at the Speak Out Fest which can't go wrong with a line up like this: Smoke or Fire, Fake Problems, Tenement Kids, Brat Pack, Rush 'n Attack, Omission, Brito.