Three years after their successful debut ‘out of place’, Kids With Buns, the indie pop duo of Amber Piddington and Marie Van Uytvanck, are happy to announce they will be releasing their sophomore album ‘bell jar’ on October 16, pre-save here.

The album announcement goes in hand with a new single "car crash”, perhaps the most surprising Kids With Buns song yet, and that's intentional. It dives into the magnetic pull of toxic lovers and the saviour complex that comes with it, but does so in a sound you've never heard from KWB before: groovy, danceable, and mischievous, with a production that pushes further than anything the band has done so far. A car crash you can't and don't want to look away from.

The album title “bell jar” is a reference to Sylvia Plath’s famous semi-autobiographical novel. “The theme of The Bell Jar is how every process in your life is actually circular, regarding the healing from mental health issues,” says Amber. “ When things get better, they will also get worse, and at some point, that becomes a very present theme in our lives. We felt that we kept falling into certain patterns.”

“The earth’s orbit can sometimes be as infuriating as it is inevitable. The sun gives just as it takes away, and perhaps the romantic soul would deem this nature’s humble trial on how to navigate the darkness.”

Much of the album’s material was written during those spells of scrambling through the darkness. The grief of processing two simultaneous breakups vs. the joy of being two songwriters who compliment each other so very potently. It’s, in a way, its own cyclical process, one that kept two souls afloat when that larger cycle fractured.

One of the duo’s biggest growth spurts since Kids With Buns’ 2023 debut LP Out of Place has been honing a newly-hatched cinematic depth. “With this album, we just had a much clearer and stronger idea of how the songs should sound,” says Marie. “Not only arrangement-wise, but the production as well. The majority of this album materialised during writing sessions in Amber’s bedroom, right in the middle of our grieving process.”

A big catalyst in fleshing the songs out further was working with Lucy Dacus-producerJacob Blizard, who they met at a festival in the Netherlands. After Jacob shot the duo a message to collaborate, before they knew it, Amber and Marie packed their bags to Philadelphia to record some of the demoed material with him. Marie: “We started out with Kids With Buns at age 18 and 20 respectively, and we were not trained musicians by any means. To be able to put that complete puzzle together; the arrangement, the songs, the production everything contributes to the whole of a song. We have had the privilege of learning it by doing it, from the bedroom to the stage. And we see the potential in each other's ideas where no one else would.”

pre-save here.