LOCAS IN LOVE Wintergala + STEFANIE SCHRANK Release Show

pop dance
LOCAS IN LOVE Winter Gala
& STEFANIE SCHRANK Album Release Show
Sunday, 14.12.2025
Admission 19:00, start 20:00

At the end of November 2008, 17 years ago, WINTER, the third album by Cologne-based LOCAS IN LOVE, was released. The group underpinned their reputation as an exceptional band operating slightly under the radar, always more interested in the crazy Gesamtkunstwerk or offbeat concept than the big breakthrough - because a Christmas album was certainly not the obvious next step for a noisy indie pop band. To mark the occasion, Locas In Love began organizing an annual "Winter Gala" in Cologne, playing clubs, cinemas, pubs and churches in the years that followed.

Locas In Love have existed in a niche of their own for over 20 years, bulky, embracing, obsessive and inviting. In that time, they have released seven critically acclaimed albums produced between Cologne and New York, played hundreds of concerts and established themselves as an indie pop institution, according to Spiegel Online "important and reassuring", according to Süddeutsche Zeitung "pleasantly serene and brilliantly cerebral".

Stefanie Schrank, the band's bassist and visual artist, is celebrating the release of her new album "Forma" on this evening. It follows her solo debut from 2019 and the EP "Schlachtrufe BRD" (2024) with the surprise hit of the same name. Her sophisticated pop combines krautrock-like analogue synthesizers and angular, elegant drum computer grooves with the personal and radical poetry of a punk-socialized Kraftwerk and Eno devotee.

The 15th edition of the traditional Locas in Love winter gala will take place on the third Sunday of Advent 2025 in the ideal location in Cologne, as Cologne's nicest Christmas market, the Ehrenfeld Christmas market, is fittingly set up in front of Bumann & Sohn. In the field of tension between noise and kitsch, Locas in Love therefore invite you to listen to their pop songs, which oscillate between noise, silence, melody and bulkiness, to impressions from the new albums of both projects and, in short, to their own version of a contemplative end to the year.