When Pommelien Thijs played five sold-out shows at Belgium’s biggest arena recently, it was a sign that she had become one of her country’s major pop stars.
About 20,000 fans a night sang along to tracks like “Atlas,” a catchy song that last year topped a major Belgian pop chart for 22 weeks. Some audience members held up bedsheets with messages to Thijs painted on them. Others paid a tattooist inside the arena to ink them with cherished lyrics.
Yet while the shows were the latest sign of Thijs’s stardom in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, her performances raised a question for some in Wallonia, the French-speaking southern part of the country: Who is this woman?
As the run of gigs kicked off, the country’s French-language public broadcaster published a two-minute explainer on Instagram detailing Thijs’s career for anyone confused. Thijs is an “enormous star,” it said — it’s just that her voice has “not yet crossed the language barrier.”
At a moment when music fans are increasingly listening to songs in languages other than their native tongues, such as Spanish tracks by Rosalía and Bad Bunny or Korean ones by K-pop groups, the way Thijs’s success has split the Belgian public highlights how language can still be a dividing line in pop.
Nick De Leu, a music critic at the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, said that only two homegrown acts — the pop chanteuse Angèle and the electro hitmaker Stromae — had recently achieved success in both parts of Belgium, and both artists sing in French.
Flanders and Wallonia have separate radio stations, charts and music festivals, de Leu said, and that makes it hard for acts to break through in both regions. Even Taylor Swift has been affected by the divide, he said, noting that her songs got far more airplay and streams in Flanders, which looks more toward American and British culture for inspiration, than the Walloon public does.
Thijs said in a recent video interview from her home in Antwerp that she found nothing unusual about being a star for one half of her language-divided country. “It is what it is,” the 25-year-old said with a laugh.
She is also finding growing success in the Netherlands and in November she has a show at the 17,000-capacity Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam. Thijs said she didn’t feel any urge to compromise to gain more fans outside that Dutch-speaking world. “If that would mean completely flipping my language, I wouldn’t know how to start,” she said.
In Belgium, some government bodies are making efforts to bridge the language divide. Since 2023, schoolchildren in French-language areas are required from about age 8 to learn a second language, and that has to be Dutch in Brussels and regions bordering Dutch-speaking areas.
Still, most children will speak only one language at home, as Thijs did growing up in Kessel, a town near Antwerp.
The daughter of a mother who taught Dutch and an IT worker father, Thijs said her childhood was “filled with language,” particularly poetry, as much as it was music.
As a child, she tasted small-scale celebrity early, appearing on Flemish children’s TV as a reporter, but her breakthrough came when she starred in “#LikeMe,” a show reminiscent of “Glee” in which the high school student characters burst into song.
Along with the rest of the show’s cast, Thijs said, she started playing gigs around Flanders, usually “under the church tower on the stages made out of beer crates.”
It was an introduction to the music industry, but Thijs didn’t start writing songs until she was asked to pen a track in English for a Christmas movie. Afterward, her manager booked her into about 40 sessions with producers to try to help kick-start a solo career.
She found that process “horrendous,” she said, particularly when she was steered toward ballads or disco. It clicked only when she returned to her childhood love of poetry and wordplay and started jotting down ideas for her own lyrics in the Notes app on her phone.
Since then, she has written her debut album, 2023’s “Per Ongeluk” (“By Accident”) and last year’s “Gedoe” (“Hassle”), a word that Dutch-speaking people use to describe inconveniences from major life-changing events to flat tires, and also an allusion to Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” one of Thijs’s inspirations for the record.
In Belgium, critics raved about the Olivia Rodrigo-reminiscent rock of both albums, especially the lyrics. De Leu of De Standaard said Thijs had a gift for beautiful imagery, which she channeled into songs that capture the concerns of young listeners, particularly their fears of not living life to the fullest. “If you see one of her live shows, you’ll notice fans cling to phrases like they’re buoys in the sea,” he said.
Other critics have called her “the voice of a generation” for addressing issues like soaring house prices and climate change.
Thijs said she found such hyperbole a bit silly. “I think we would have solved many problems if we were, like, ‘Yes, we have found one voice to represent us, we all agree,’” she said.
Plus, in Belgium, a voice like that can’t speak in just one language, alone.
Thijs is making tentative steps to make her music more widely heard in the French-speaking part of the country. She is scheduled to play Ronquières, a pop music festival in Wallonia in August, and she said she was having French lessons and using the app Duolingo to work on her stage banter.
“The only thing I hope is I don’t accidentally insult them in French,” Thijs said. “If I don’t do that, the rest will be nice.”
Several fans said after one of her recent arena shows that they hoped the singer wouldn’t be tempted to completely switch languages to reach more fans. Elias Meers, 24, clutching a vinyl copy of “Gedoe” to his chest, said he knew that Thijs had the skill to write in English and have her songs be “just as powerful, just meaningful.”
But he had a plea for her. “Stay with us,” he said. “Stay here.” Every region needs its own superstar.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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