Last time round it took the brilliant Einstürzende Neubauten 12 years between albums when they released ‘Alles in Allem’ back in 2020 during the midst of the COVID crisis. This time round we have only had to wait a faintly bearable four years with the news at they will be releasing their new album, ‘Rampen (apm: alien pop music)’ on 5 April 2024, and, as a delicious taster, they have unveiled the single ‘Ist Ist’.
With a heartbeat pulse and little slivers of noise, the track commences with a driving bass thrum and Blixa Bargeld’s iconic delivery. Very much drawing on their muscular industrial crunch with the prowling ambiance, there is a lightning flash with an ambulant piano that wanders around in the ether before the track reaches a clanging finale, a crescendo that leaves us hanging with a droning thrum and a neat return to the chorus.
The themes are about mysteriously searching for meaning:
I’ve been to Niagara Falls
I’ve been to both great walls
but it wasn’t there
It wasn’t there
No, it was not there
The accompanying video highlights the percussive foundation with a Nosferatu-like silhouette of the drummer:
This is a brilliant and very exciting return to the fray and the band is undertaking a massive tour in support of the new album (currently just in Europe). Full details of the tour are below and tickets can be found here.
You can stream the single here and through the link below, and pre-order the new album here.
I last interviewed Bargeld back in 2020: look out for a return bout in the coming week.
Since the mid-1980s, Einstürzende Neubauten has been experimenting on stage with what they call “Rampen”: public improvisations with open developments and outcomes; launchpads into the still unexplored. The recordings of the Rampen that the band performed in 2022 during the encore on its last Alles in Allem tour serve now as the basis for the new album.
‘Rampen (apm: alien pop music)’ is pop music for parallel universes and in-between worlds ‒ for hyperspaces and interzones. It is microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. It’s a demi-sophisticated claim outside of all physical laws, with which Einstürzende Neubauten enters a stylistic no man’s land between the past and future. There’s a return to the roots on one side, while a new art form emerges on the other from powerful eruptions of noise encountering cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: popular music for aliens and outcasts. Anti-pop has become alien pop. Outlandish. Spun like a cocoon. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not unintentionally, the reduced artwork on the cover is reminiscent of the iconic layout on The Beatles’ White Album.
According to Bargeld:
It’s based on the idea that the Einstürzende Neubauten is just as famous in another solar system as The Beatles are in our world (noting the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop -cultural discontinuity).
Feature Photograph: Thomas Rabsch
