‘She’s a pop star in half her country’: The New York Times discovers Pommelien Thijs

The wildly popular Pommelien Thijs effortlessly filled the 20,000-capacity AFAS Dome five times in April and has already sold out her November show in Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. “She’s a pop star,” says Alex Marshall of The New York Times. “For half a country.”

Marshall, based in London, often writes about European stars for the newspaper, and this time he used the 25-year-old singer, musician and actor as an example of how divided Belgium is by language. While the AFAS shows, he writes, “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?”

He pointed to RTBF’s Instagram post detailing Thijs’s career in the wake of selling some 100,000 tickets to her concerts in Antwerp. The post notes that she is “an enormous star” whose voice has “not yet crossed the language barrier”.

Thijs’s lyrics, all of which she writers herself, are in Dutch and have been praised for their emotional maturity and depth of subject matter. “At a moment when music fans are increasingly listening to songs in languages other than their native tongues, such as Spanish tracks by Rosalia and Bad Bunny or Korean ones by K-pop groups,” writes Marshall, “the way Thijs’s success has split the Belgian public highlights how language can still be a dividing line in pop.”

Marshall interviewed Thijs for the article , and she told him that she had no intention of writing in another language. “I wouldn’t know how to start,” she said. She is, however, scheduled to appear at the Ronquières festival in Hainaut province this summer – her first gig in Wallonia.

She is working on her French in the lead-up, she revealed. “I hope I don’t accidentally insult them in French,” she said. “If I don’t do that, the rest will be nice.”