School is Cool

School is Cool came together in Antwerp in September 2009, a Belgian baroque-pop band that barely had time to learn its own songs before the prizes started arriving. A couple of months in, they took the audience award and third place from the jury at FrappantPOP, an Antwerp talent hunt, and in March 2010 they won Humo's Rock Rally, the contest that had earlier launched dEUS, Das Pop and The Black Box Revelation.

Johannes Genard sings and plays guitar, and the early lineup surrounded him with violin, keyboards and piled-up percussion from Nele Paelinck, Andrew Van Ostade and Matthias Dillen, with Toon Van Baelen on bass. The debut single, "New Kids in Town", premiered on Studio Brussel in April 2010 with a video they made themselves on the cheap, and it spent six weeks at number one on the De Afrekening radio chart. That summer they worked the Belgian festival circuit, from Dranouter to Pukkelpop.

Entropology arrived in October 2011, a bright, busy, handclapping sort of record full of big-hearted choruses: "In Want of Something", "Warpaint" and "The World Is Gonna End Tonight", which topped De Afrekening for three weeks and, with "The Underside", reached British national radio on Radio 1 and Radio 6. Nature Fear followed in March 2014, heard as darker and more grown-up, with Hanne Torfs's cello now in the mix.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.