Newmen (Neo-Kraut, Synth-Pop)

In the organizer's words:

Newmen's new album - a hypnotic and clairvoyant loop
Floating synth-pop combines with groovy neo-kraut to form a stylish loop

New Waves by Newmen roll onto a utopian beach in shimmering waves of sound: inspired by a short story by science fiction author J.G. Ballard, Newmen weave the past and the future into a musical Möbius strip on their new album "Terminal Beach": a loop that incessantly revolves around themes such as dystopia and utopia and binds them into a stylistically confident loop with early electronics, synth-pop and neo-kraut. The pulsating centerpiece of the album, "The Loop", begins like a lost Kraftwerk piece with a floating synthesizer melody and vibrating vocoder vocals that herald algorithms and nightmare echo chambers, and transitions into a melancholy, time-critical human-machine mantra - "on (technical) repeat", as it were, as one line of the lyrics puts it.

Newmen's songs always sound as if they have a direct line to the past and the future at the same time: "Flensburg and the BKA have our data there", sang the robots of Kraftwerk in 1981, Newmen's acoustic metaphors also revolve around these data excesses that have led us into social media prisons and (digital) late capitalism. But with their clever and congenial new songs, the five-piece band from Frankfurt am Main have not only written a commentary on today's world, in which everything has become consumable - swiping, liking, scrolling - but also a soundtrack to float away to: Hypnotic and clairvoyant at the same time, "Terminal Beach" is a thematic continuation of the previous album "Futur II" (2021), the completed future now landing on a final beach where there are no paradisiacal Instagram motifs for permanent introspection, but plenty of time for real self-reflection in the midst of a destroyed environment.

Newmen's music helps as a sonic hall of mirrors; the individual tracks on "Terminal Beach", like Ballard's story of the same name, lead us through our multi-perspective world with multi-dimensional aspects. Instrumental pieces such as the herbaceous, bubbling "Legato Linear" cleverly play with "Hallogallo" by NEU! and beam it into the disco with its beats. Stereolab's psychedelic pop is the inspiration for "Echo System", a clever and beautiful song whose perspectives change and contradict each other in the course of I to You. We find this contradiction in everything and in everyday life, we are "new radicals. in- between: the void" as it says in "Soft & Somber Pt.2". And Newmen also reconcile seemingly contradictory musical elements when Fleetwood Mac meanderingly meets Can in the deceptively calming track "Comfort Inn", so that the project name of the song is "Fleetwood Can". A quiet humor creeps into the retro-futurism, an underestimated contemporary that we also hear in the final groovy, beat-heavy track "Concrete Beach", when the kettle from Newmen's studio kitchen bubbles away at the very end of the album.

When cultural criticism comes across as shimmering and free as on "Terminal Beach", when the music takes us playfully and shimmeringly on a sonic journey in which time plays no role and time is not money, then the future gives hope again. Newmen achieve the rare feat of wrapping heavy themes in a weightless sound - profound and danceable at the same time.

In cooperation with Schön Kultur e.V. and with the kind support of the Cultural Office of the City of Mainz

Price information:

Admission on a donation basis (10€ recommended)