Coming off the back of a pandemic-shelved farewell show, Call It Off didn’t know they were about to be reborn. But a Taylor Swift cover neither of them wanted to make turned into the most unlikely second act in Dutch pop-punk, bringing metalheads and Swifties into the same room, which, as Sergei Christian explains, “feels like meant to be, honestly…”
Words by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc) | Aug 24, 2024
After a farewell show got shelved by a global pandemic, Dutch pop-punk troopers Call It Off found themselves accidentally reborn: not through new original songs, but a Taylor Swift cover that one half of the band point-blank refused to make. Now, with a rebuilt lineup, a wildly unexpected new audience, and a fresh record landing this September, Sergei Christian and Maurice Bolier talk quitting, grieving, and stumbling into something that finally feels right, which, as Sergei puts it, “feels like meant to be, honestly…”
Some bands break up quietly. Call It Off tried to, and the universe simply wouldn’t let them.
The story starts back in 2013, when Maurice Bolier was touring as a stand-in guitarist alongside his old bandmate Adrian, and the two of them, having the time of their lives, decided on the spot to start something together. “We searched for a drummer, a bass player. That’s how I met Sergei, through a friend of mine,” Maurice remembers. What followed moved fast. “The years after that, it went super quick. We did a lot of stuff. We did good in the Netherlands, we got signed by a big label, we did a lot of television and radio, we did an album, then another album, and we hit the road.” That road stretched all the way to China, all off the back of their own original songs, a Sony deal, a charting album in Abandoned, and a Top 40 hit in Scream Your Heart Out.
Then the wheels started to come off. “At the end of that cycle, I was burned out a bit,” Maurice admits. “I said, I have to focus on different things in my life. I wanted to invest in the simple things, get a job.” A farewell show was booked. Then Covid happened, and it got postponed. And postponed again.
“I have to say, I never wanted to quit the band,” Sergei says, still a little indignant about it years later. “It was Morris who wanted to step away. I was really mad at Morris. I thought, this is for life.”
Stuck in limbo, with a farewell show that kept slipping further away, the pair found themselves back in each other’s orbit. “We had to give our people something,” Maurice says, so they recorded an EP to hold fans over: an unexpectedly honest goodbye letter of a release, home to a track called Til The End that Sergei describes plainly as “basically a goodbye letter towards each other.” Nobody involved planned for it to be anything other than closure.
Except it reignited something. “We started talking, like, oh, this is so much fun, why did we quit?” Maurice says. They spoke to labels, floated the idea of the original lineup reforming, and got a firm no from the other two members, who’d moved on with their lives. So Sergei and Maurice asked for their blessing to carry Call It Off forward without them, got it, and rebuilt around two new faces: guitarist Gio, already a familiar presence from his time playing live keys with the band, and bassist Timmy, one of Maurice’s oldest friends, who’d driven the van on Call It Off’s very first tour. “They said, let’s do this,” Maurice recalls. The new lineup went straight into the studio and recorded an original album from scratch, one they’re still proud of today.
Then, almost as an afterthought, they started filming covers for social media. “Punk Rock Factory brought us onto the idea,” Sergei clarifies, after the band supported them on a run of shows. “They said you have to try filming your songs, but the covers were our own idea, just to get out of our own way.” One of those covers happened to be a Taylor Swift song, something Sergei had been actively avoiding.
“No, no, no, I’m not going to touch her songs,” he laughs, recalling his own resistance. “And then we did one, and it kind of went through the roof. For me personally, it was like, okay, this feels so right to do. This feels like it’s me, you know? Playing her songs with our sound.” The moment it truly landed, he says, was performing the songs live for the first time. “It really felt like an angel from above told me: dude, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. I’m not spiritual or anything, but it really felt like that.”
That accidental pivot has completely rewritten the band’s trajectory, and reshaped how the two founding members feel about the whole project. “It feels like a new startup, a new beginning,” Sergei says of where the band sits now, comparing it against the earlier, scrappier version of Call It Off. “The first tours we did were more like a DIY thing. It still is, in a way, only the shows are getting bigger, and we’re more grown up, more professional.”
That growth has been most visible at home. “The Netherlands is such a small country,” Maurice explains. “The alternative scene is small too, and we’ve been around a while, but when we announced Eras Tour Goes Pop Punk, the shows sold out super quick. We were like, oh God, what’s the crowd going to be?” What turned up surprised everyone. “It’s a mix. Swifties, younger kids, punk rockers, metalheads. It works. It’s a lot of fun.”
Sergei goes further: “There are eight year old kids, but there are also 50 year old metalheads in Slayer shirts. Everything in between. The Swifties learn about pop punk now, and the punk rockers are starting to respect Taylor Swift. It’s like, oh, but these songs are actually really good. I think that’s the best part, that we’re bringing worlds together.” A sold-out Berlin show last March crystallised it for Maurice. “We do first-time stage diving in our set. I asked the crowd who wants to try, and nobody dared. Then this girl went for it, and after that, everybody wanted to. We were looking at each other like, okay, they get it now.”
Under the surface of the covers is a genuine songwriting exercise, not a novelty act. “We want to respect our songwriting, so it has to feel natural, our own sound,” Sergei says. “Her songs aren’t that different from ours, honestly, we just arrange them differently. For us, it’s like a puzzle. We can put Green Day in a Taylor song. We can put in whatever we listened to when we were younger. That’s the fun part, it’s a whole mix of everything we’ve ever loved.”
Ask either of them what to listen to first, and the answer is unanimous: 2025’s Not Another Sad Album. “For me, it’s the most personal record we’ve ever written,” Sergei says. “Especially Morris and me, we went through a lot since the band was supposed to quit. It’s the most personal storytelling we’ve done.” Standout cut Watch The World remains a personal favourite, though he’s quick to add he’s “really proud of Abandoned too.”
Getting to this point hasn’t come without reckoning with the past. Both members speak candidly about the pressures of their major-label years. “Signing with Sony comes with a lot of pressure,” Maurice reflects. “It didn’t feel like we were connected to ourselves in that way, or to each other.” Sergei’s blunter: “I think we were a bit done with each other. We wanted different things, you know, one of us wanted a serious family, kids, and the other wanted to go away all the time.” He pauses, then adds, only half-joking: “I hate to say it, but for us, Covid was a blessing in the sky. We were forced to look back at what we’d actually done, and I started to appreciate the band more. We went to China, we got nominated for awards. I never stood still on that before.”
That same clarity has changed how they think about social media, something Sergei admits they resisted for years. “We’re not from the social media generation. For us it felt like, if you do all the social media stuff, you’re a sellout. But the world’s changing. Through a show you can reach maybe a few hundred people, maybe a couple thousand through a festival. Through social media, you can reach the whole world. It took us a while to embrace that.” Maurice points to Simple Plan as a band who’ve made peace with the same shift: “They do a really good job. It’s fun, and it translates.”
“Now we know so much better what we like, what we stand for,” Maurice adds. “We’re really comfortable in the place we’re in right now.”
That comfort is heading straight into a UK and Europe run, including a support slot for Punk Rock Factory at Liverpool’s Olympia, a show Sergei’s genuinely excited for, right up until he remembers what comes after it. “Long ride. We have to make the trip from Liverpool to Eindhoven in one night, because we’re playing there the next day. Kind of not looking forward to that bit. But I am looking forward to Liverpool.” It’ll be his first time playing the UK specifically with this band, despite having toured the country before.
Looking further ahead, the wish list gets predictably big. “I’d love to play Slam Dunk, we’d love to play Download,” Maurice says. “I’d love to play some festivals in America too.” Sergei’s aiming even higher: “I have an all time dream, and that’s Coachella. Red Rocks too. I just have this childhood dream of touring the whole world.” For collaborators, he name-checks Dashboard Confessional, someone he’s met a few times and calls “a good guy,” before circling back, inevitably, to the elephant in the room. “I’m convinced that one day I’ll meet the Queen. Taylor. I’m convinced a lot of her songs were supposed to be played like we’re playing them.” Someone jokes about getting her out at the Super Bowl alongside the band. “Out on the Super Bowl with Taylor,” Sergei laughs. “Didn’t think about that.”
For now, there’s plenty to be getting on with. A new record lands September 4th, one Maurice calls “really fun to make” and is “proud of again,” alongside standing calls to revisit Not Another Sad Album. It caps off a genuinely relentless run: three releases in eighteen months, including a Taylor covers album written, recorded, mixed, and mastered inside five weeks flat. “It was crazy,” Maurice laughs. “A lot of fun.”
Whatever comes next, neither of them is entertaining an ending this time around. “For the future, I hope we can do this forever,” Sergei says. “I mean, we quit once. I’m not planning on doing that again.”
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