Brutalism 3000 and their new album: German export rackets

Maybe I can report something positive again in these times when things are not going well in the country – the railways, the education, the demographics, the roads, the bridges, the Bundeswehr, the fascists in the parliaments, the cars, the heating systems, the biogas, the fuel prices, the football, Dieter Nuhr’s jokes on television and so on: The pop from Germany is working brilliantly at the moment. Abroad. So: USA, South America et al. This kind of foreign country.

Which is still surprising. Until recently, if you had asked, just for example: “Consistently punctual ICE trains between Berlin and Munich, really great music from Germany that is making its mark on the US market, or a solid statistic with real numbers from the mouth of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which comes first?”, very few people would have bet on pop.

Then are Kitschkrieg with their neon, bright gray heartbreak techno, as they say, “gone viral in the States.” At least a little. Number 129 in the Billboard charts with the entirely German-language song “Gut Enug”. Not yet a complete takeover of the country, but still an event that has never happened in this millennium. And now a new album from Brutalism 3000.

Don’t worry: it’s quite possible you don’t know them in this country. Musically they are a bit, warning: exhausting. Sometimes a bit cumbersome, yes, yes, and stressful too. Which are all euphemisms for attacking the vast majority of human sensory organs in a way that the most radical Japanese manga can do, and perhaps a few low-level CIA torture methods. Titles of previous singles: “I have my days in Berghain”, “Satan was a Babyboomer”, “No Sex with Cops”.

Things like this are still not easy in Germany. In Los Angeles, just for example, they recently sold 4,000 tickets within a good hour, as they will tell you in the video call. In Mexico they fill arenas that can hold up to 10,000 people. In South America they were one of the most celebrated acts at this year’s Lollapalooza Festival and this list could go on and on.

This will also have to do with the fact that foreign countries still want to value the so-called German virtues. And since historical experience shows that punctuality, craftsmanship or at least democratic prudence are currently not suitable, new qualities have recently been discovered – in the field of beat crafting. In recent years, a certain lack of compromise has actually developed in some places, and no longer just in Berlin and not just in the broad genre of techno. But there too.

“It quickly became apparent that it had to be as aggressive an album as possible.”

In music theory, one would probably say that Brutalism 3000 combine gabber and hardstyle very ambitiously with elements of punk and wave. And it is certainly fair reader service if you add reassuringly that with an averagely exciting 9-to-5 job you don’t have to be able to differentiate all of this absolutely clearly from the hard tech, dubstep, techno, industrial and nu metal that also influences you.

So to try it again figuratively: In their more unyielding, i.e. the best of many excellent moments, the duo from Berlin sounds a bit like what the esophagus feels like when you feed it a few highly concentrated liters of denatured alcohol with a beer bong. Then gargle with something glowing. In this sense: descriptive band name, of course.

By the way, your new album is called “Harmony”.

Of course it was originally intended as a joke. Like many good jokes, it came with its own truth at some point. Here’s the thing: Brutalism 3000 may sound like they do. However, the people behind the project, producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, are perhaps actually the nicest, most approachable, most Gen-Z cuddly creatures you can imagine in contrast.

You can reach her in her shared apartment in Berlin. They met on Tinder in 2018 and only later started making music together. In the background hangs a gentle, naive portrait of the actor Wesley Snipes in his role as the vampire hunter “Blade” (which is also the name of one of their songs) and in front of the painting Zeitner says: “We wanted to do something completely new, and it quickly became apparent that it had to be as aggressive an album as possible.” The title “Harmony” naturally came to mind. Especially since the work should also and above all attack what they say is the “toxic positivity” (mindfulness, inhalation/exhalation, the body as a temple and so on) of the world. Victoria Vassiliki Daldas: “We wanted to create something extreme for it. And something radically true. Then suddenly more hope slipped into the lyrics and something like joy through the guests.”

Incidentally, the two of them say something like that in a tone and with an inner attitude as if they were sitting in an extremely peaceful petting enclosure and were just scratching around in the fur of overly fluffy animals. It’s fantastic.

As for the “completely new” thing they wanted to do: that’s true. Not exactly in the sense of a radical break. Anyone who knows their debut album “Ultrakunst” or songs like “Love doesn’t come from Berlin” will continue to discover the same band. However, the development is astonishing. The compositions have become more nuanced, more surprising and yet more song-oriented. Maybe even poppier. The sound design is more multidimensional. The productions seem even more as if they had lost their minds because of their constant urge to reject all pop norms. It’s all really, really wonderful.

The texts, on the other hand, are equally more mysterious and become more direct, however they manage it. They also steadily tear through the scene like projectiles from large-caliber, semi-automatic handguns. “No Friends In The Company”, an acid-dripping piece of musical violence: “There is no friends in the company / There is no friends in the crack house / There is no I in energy / There is no teeth in my mouth”. Song number three, “A Milli”, which could very well set the music to a film in which huge, coarse-scaled lizard creatures race in battle tanks: “I feel so ambitious / All I want is big checks, milli racks, kill switch / Then again yeah I feel so fucking vicious / I got a milli a milli a milli wishes on my wishlist”. This kind of lyrical gun violence.

Oh, as for the guests who brought some joy: the British melancholy spreaders Underworld immerse the mood on “Friends At The Pigshed” in a fabulously soft, sepia-like light that glows straight from the nineties. Actress Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”) recites a poem that says the morning hours are reserved for the lucky ones. Dylan Brady, one half of the American electronic duo Rumpelstiltskin 100 Gecshelped as co-producer to expand the usual songwriting structures from the ground up and immensely. And with the techno wizard Boys Noize, they finally went through the sound aesthetics again. It was worth it. Very.

They are currently on tour again: France, Spain. Then again big blocks in the USA – Inglewood, Chicago, New York. There are currently no solo shows in Germany.