EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN - alien pop music 2024

They are looking for new forms. For the undiscovered sound and the still unspoken word. Since their founding on April 1, 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten have been shifting the parameters of mainstream and subculture to make the inaudible audible. And perhaps also the unheard. A field research experiment spanning four decades that is now entering the next stage. In its 44th year of existence, the formation is going far back to its roots in order to redefine itself at the same time. A changed self-image for which the Berlin quintet plus eins 2024 created its own genre: apm - alien pop music.

Constant development – that is how you could briefly summarize the work of Einstürzende Neubauten. A musical evolution that began with the debut album “Kollaps” released in 1981 and is now manifested in the album “Rampen – apm: alien pop music” to be released on April 24th, on which Blixa Bargeld, NU Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present themselves from their most unpredictable and idiosyncratic side. On their new album, Neubauten put an end to all sound speculation – albeit a late one.

Since the mid-1980s, Einstürzende Neubauten have been experimenting on stage with so-called ramps: public improvisations with an open development and outcome; launch pads into the still unexplored, which the band performed in the encore section of their last "Alles in Allem" tour in 2022 and the recordings of which serve 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. Microcosmic and intergalactic at the same time. A demimondean assertion outside all physical laws, with which Einstürzende Neubauten enter a stylistic no-man’s land between past and future. On the one hand, a return to the roots, on the other hand, a new art form emerges from loud eruptions of bangs, met with cryptic, often fragmentary lyrics: popular music for aliens and outsiders. Anti-pop has become alien pop. Strange. Cocoon-like. Unheard. Sonus inauditus. Not entirely unintentionally, the reduced cover artwork is reminiscent of the iconic layout of the Beatles’ “White Album”. “Based on the idea that Einstürzende Neubauten are just as famous in another solar system as the Beatles are in our world,” says Blixa Bargeld about the balancing act between avant-garde and tongue-in-cheek, provocation and pop-cultural discontinuity.

This also directly sets the central theme that runs like a thread through all the songs: change, utopian thought experiments and transience.

"I found a few solutions on the record and formulated things that I hadn't formulated before because they weren't so clear to me. I'm someone who thinks I can gain knowledge through music. It's always been like that. The conviction that I'll find something in music that I didn't know before. And that I'll sing something that I didn't know before. Something that turns out to be the truth. Or at least makes sense if you want to keep it a little smaller." This album represents the next stage of evolution, where you've finally left familiar language behind. And the opening up of further, infinite possibilities: alien pop music