Yeah Bagel

Nusantara Beat sound like a family photograph left too long in the sun, then plugged into a fuzz pedal.

Not damaged. Transformed.

The colours have shifted. The outlines have softened. The faces have become partly memory, partly electricity. What comes back is not nostalgia, exactly. Nostalgia is too tidy for this. Too much sepia, not enough bass. Nusantara Beat are doing something stranger and more alive: taking the music that travelled through homes, grandparents, cassette shelves, kitchens, weddings, half-remembered lyrics and inherited rhythms, then pushing it back out through Amsterdam rehearsal rooms until it starts glowing in fresh weather.

They are often described as Indonesian psych-folk, which is accurate enough in the way a map is accurate until you actually enter the city. The group are based in Amsterdam, but their music keeps facing the archipelago. The word “Nusantara” itself carries the idea of Indonesia as many islands, many cultures, many histories held inside one wider body. For this band, that is not branding. It is method. Their sound is built from distance and return: Dutch-Indonesian musicians reaching toward ancestral music not as collectors, not as curators, but as descendants trying to make the old signal audible in the room they are standing in now.

That matters.

Because music from the diaspora can be treated badly by the marketplace. The algorithm likes clean labels. It likes “global,” “fusion,” “world,” all the little supermarket shelf-stickers that make complicated culture available for passive consumption. Nusantara Beat resist that flattening by being too specific and too fluid at the same time. They are not offering Indonesia as decorative flavour. They are not putting gamelan dust on indie pop and calling it revelation. They are working through Sundanese traditions, Sunda-pop, 1960s and 70s Indonesian psych, surf twang, funk pulse, folk melody, electric shimmer, and the emotional problem of belonging to somewhere you may have inherited before you ever fully understood it.

The band’s story begins in Amsterdam, but also before Amsterdam. It begins in West Java, in family lines, in remembered songs, in the strange privacy of cultural inheritance. Michael Joshua Yonata was born in West Java before moving to the Netherlands as a teenager. The other members, Megan de Klerk, Jordy Sanger, Rouzy Portier, Sonny Groeneveld and Gino Groeneveld, were born and raised in the Netherlands with Indonesian heritage. Some had already travelled through other bands and scenes: EUT, Jungle by Night, Altın Gün. That background gives Nusantara Beat a useful double-vision. They know how psychedelic music works as a live instrument. They know how grooves can be stretched until they become weather. But they also know that ancestry is not an effect pedal.

Their early singles reworked older Indonesian material. That was the first door. Songs like “Djanger,” “Kota Bandung” and “Mang Becak” were not museum pieces under glass. They were living organisms, allowed to sweat again. The group took the boldness of 60s and 70s Indonesian pop seriously: the way those older musicians were already listening outward, already absorbing Western guitars, surf, funk and psychedelia into local forms. Nusantara Beat are not modernising a frozen past. They are joining a conversation that was already hybrid, already restless, already looking for new clothes to wear to the same ancient party.

That makes their self-titled debut album feel less like a first statement than a threshold.

Released in November 2025 on Glitterbeat, Nusantara Beat is the moment where the band move from reinterpretation into original writing. Eleven tracks, and the key word is “original,” because the album does not abandon tradition so much as step into it with wet shoes. It is not a polite homage record. It moves. It coils. It smiles with one gold tooth. The guitars have that bright, needling twang that can turn a melody into a question mark. The percussion has a communal intelligence, less like a backbeat than a small village of hands. Synths arrive like neon seen through rain. Megan de Klerk’s voice often seems to float above the instruments, but never detached from them. It is a kite tied to the drum circle.

The album is rooted strongly in Sundanese music and the pelog scale associated with gamelan traditions, but it does not simply present those elements as ethnographic proof. Traditional instruments and samples appear as texture, pressure and architecture: kecapi, kendang, gongs, gamelan colours, all folded into modern production. What could have become tasteful heritage wallpaper instead becomes propulsion. There is a difference between reverence and obedience. Nusantara Beat understand that. Reverence listens deeply. Obedience embalms. This record listens, then moves.

“Ke Masa Lalu” opens the album with its title already pointing backwards: to the past. But the sound does not walk backwards. It advances sideways, wearing old fabric cut into a new jacket. “Kalangkang” brings in the ghost-story current, the sense that memory is not always warm. Sometimes it follows you at dusk. “Di Pantai” drifts toward the beach, not as postcard escape but as humid suspended longing. “Bakar” later in the record feels hotter, more nocturnal, closer to a streetlight flickering beside a parked scooter. Across the album, love and haunting keep changing masks. The songs are full of sweetness, but it is not soft-focus sweetness. It has bite marks.

Then comes “Gapura.”

At just over two minutes, “Gapura” could be mistaken for a small thing. It is not. Its title means gateway, and on this album that feels almost too perfect, almost suspiciously neat, until you realise the band have built the whole project around thresholds. Between the Netherlands and Indonesia. Between family memory and public performance. Between old pop and new psych. Between folk tradition and live-wire modernity. Between the song you inherit and the song you finally allow yourself to write.

“Gapura” sits as track seven, past the halfway mark, like an archway inside the album rather than at its entrance. That placement matters. By the time it arrives, the listener has already crossed several borders. The ear has adjusted to the band’s grammar: the way guitar lines curl, the way rhythm carries melody, the way the music can feel both celebratory and slightly haunted. “Gapura” becomes a hinge. Not the grand gate at the start of a palace, but the side entrance that takes you somewhere more interesting. The one with chipped paint, incense ash, a motorbike leaning nearby, and a sound leaking from the courtyard.

It also works beautifully in the Yeah Bagel universe because Yeah Bagel has always cared about the in-between spaces: the edit, the transmission, the bootleg corridor, the track that does not announce itself as important but changes the temperature of the whole room. “Gapura” is exactly that kind of track. It is not trying to flatten you. It does not need to arrive with stadium wrists in the air. It opens a small door in the mix and lets another geography breathe through.

The album it comes from is full of those openings. Nusantara Beat is not a record about going “back to roots” in the simplistic industry sense. Roots are not a tourist destination. Roots are underground, tangled, stubborn, feeding things you cannot always see. This is a record about what happens when those roots meet voltage. When the inherited becomes playable. When musicians raised between cultures stop treating that betweenness as a wound and start treating it as an instrument.

There is a quiet politics in that.

Not slogan politics. Not manifesto politics. Something more durable. In an era when streaming platforms keep compressing culture into mood categories and borderless playlists, Nusantara Beat insist on texture, lineage and specificity. They make music that travels, but it travels with its papers deliberately smudged. It refuses the clean customs lane. It carries family, language, translation, old pop, Sundanese melody, Balinese shimmer, Dutch rehearsal-room electricity, and the happy danger of musicians discovering that the past was never as still as people said it was.

That may be why the band’s rise feels earned rather than engineered. They have connected with audiences far beyond the obvious lanes, including in Indonesia itself, where the songs are not exotic artefacts but part of a living cultural feedback loop. That loop is important. Diaspora music can sometimes point only backward, toward an imagined home. Nusantara Beat point in more directions. Back, yes. But also outward. Also forward. Also sideways into the dance.

And that is where the real charge lives.

Nusantara Beat are not asking permission from the archive. They are not standing outside the door waiting to be let in. They have found the gapura, stepped through it, and started setting up amps in the courtyard.

The boring world can stay at the gate.

Gapura by Nusantara Beat appears on Yeah Bagel's Open Format Transmission 2026.01 at 00:09:35