“Even when the world collapses, life goes on”: The Return of the Indetronica Legends The Notwist | music

‘I“It went very quickly,” says Markus Asher. “We’ve never been so fast with a record.” He’s sitting on the end of a sofa in Notwist’s Munich studio. On the other side is his brother Micah Asher. Beside them, Siko Baek, who joined the band in 2014, balances on a chair. For a group known for meticulous studio skill, speed is an unfamiliar sensation. For most of their careers, Notwests worked slowly, arranging, revising, and rethinking, as if wary of committing too early to anything at all.

Formed in 1989 in the Bavarian city of Weilheim, Notwist began as a heavy metal trio before evolving, over the next decade, into one of Germany’s most distinctive bands. Their breakthrough album, Neon Golden (2002), combined indie songwriting with electronic textures, shaped largely by then-member Martin Gretschmann, also known as Console or Acid Pauli, in a way that sounded both closed and strangely expansive. Its influence traveled far beyond Germany, securing the band a place on the roster of independent experimental trends in the early 2000s. Pitchfork named Neon Golden one of the best albums of the 2000s.

Marcus Asher’s voice has always been at the heart of everything: soft, fragile, and with an unmistakable tone. His Bavarian accent, singing lyrics that oscillated between simplistic and melancholy, provided a counter-image to the bombastic lyrics with which German music is often exported. Whereas the since-disgraced, but still commercially successful, Rammstein symbolized one side of the Teutonic coin, brutality, toughness, the rolling R and a provocative play on Nazi imagery as spectacle, Notwist represents another facet of Germanness: one rooted in introspection, curiosity and emotional restraint.

The profound melancholy of romanticism, the sense of locally anchored universality and the terrifying curiosity of technology. Less Leni Riefenstahl, and more Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the Grand Tour, Robert Schumann at his piano, meditating on love, or Caspar David Friedrich capturing in his paintings the pervasive sense of longing and tranquility of the lone hiker in the mountains.

Nearly 25 years later, Usher and his brother remain the stable core of the band. Everything else has shifted. Notwist Weilheim left for Munich, constantly changing lineups and reshaping their sound, from grunge and indie rock to electronica, trip-hop, krautrock and jazz. Their latest album, Vertigo Days (2021), embraced collaboration as a style, featuring artists including Angel Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, Saya and Juana Molina.

This outward-looking impulse runs deep on News from Planet Zombie, the band’s tenth album, but its importance lies as much in how it’s made as in its sound. They typically spend long periods of time “editing,” as they put it, with each track, making Planet Zombie an ensemble experience. After years of remote collaboration, file sharing, and digital isolation — a situation that has intensified during the pandemic — Notwist made a conscious decision to return to a physical presence. The album was recorded over the course of one week at Import Export, a former industrial building in Munich that is now used as a non-profit arts space, performance venue, and lunch canteen.

For the first time since their earliest recordings (apart from each band member’s numerous side projects), the band played together in one room. “More or less live,” Asher says. “It was an experience.” The experiment worked. “Suddenly we were really done.” Friends and collaborators moved in and out of sessions: American-born, Munich-based photographer Enid Vallo sings; Haruka Yoshizawa, one half of Acher’s DJ duo Alien DJs, plays taishuguto and harmonium. She is joined by Tianping clarinetist Christoph Xiao, who moved from Shanghai to Munich; Jazz musician Matthias Goetz contributes trombone. At lunchtime, the building served as a canteen. “Sometimes there were people listening,” Micah Asher says. “This is very different from the strict studio environment.”

The result is a record that feels tactile and exposed. Planet Zombie is warmer and grittier than its predecessors, its spatial qualities emphasized rather than softened. You can hear the air moving around the instruments, and the musicians interacting with each other. After years in which music, like so much else, was centered on screens, the album insists on being present.

This insistence is not a coincidence. “During Covid, we were sitting in this room, working on everything we had,” Marcus Asher says. “We invited people to collaborate, but everyone was alone in front of their computer. That doesn’t feel right anymore.” Recording Planet Zombie collectively was an “emotional decision” – a way to reclaim something lost during lockdown: closeness, serendipity, shared time.

It’s also a response to a broader cultural moment, he notes: “We felt the need to come together and not separate ourselves.” Notwist have rarely been an overtly political band, but Planet Zombie carries a quiet political charge in its rejection of isolation, perhaps a rejection of the disembodied logic accelerated by the pandemic. The album title refers to discomfort. Zombies, in the end, are characters who cannot survive, trapped between life and death. Asher resists writing a direct message. “Even when it seems like the world is falling apart, life goes on,” he says. “People still come together and make things happen.” He adds that horror has always been a way to address primitive collective fears, and to give form to fears that are difficult to name.

Who then inhabits this “zombie planet”? “Isn’t it strange how simple things often are?” Asher asks. “That people with power are driven by greed and base motives?” The answer remains intentionally unresolved. Planet Zombie’s lyrics stay true to Notwist’s long-standing preoccupation with isolation and dislocation, offering fragments rather than slogans.

If the album has a stance, it’s not so much what it says as what it does. After a period defined by distance and disembodiment, and in a culture still haunted by lockdown – by screens, isolation, and a low-level fear of disconnection – Planet Zombie seems almost extreme in its modesty. You can hear people sharing air, time and uncertainty. There are no grand gestures here, just the insistence that life happens between the bodies in the rooms. Notwist suggests that if this were a zombie planet, treatment might be both as mundane and as difficult as opening doors, gathering, and playing.