Perhaps it is Vienna’s manageable size that makes the Austrian capital such fertile ground for independent and always resistant pop: the physical proximity to one another that drives artists to outdo each other; the cozy atmosphere of Austria; and spaces like the FM4 radio station that leave room for experiments. Or probably a mix of all. In any case, Pauls Jets are one of those indie pop/Neue Neue Deutsche Welle/Austropop bands that constantly reinvent themselves in their own quirky world.
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On their fourth album they go into space, but the way people imagined it in the 20th century. You could perhaps call this longing for an old idea of the future. It beeps and squeaks, and the spaceship in which we take off sounds more like shimmering technostalgia than high-tech. It’s fitting in a way, because crises are dealt with thematically here, personal, social and global. “Everything is collapsing, everything is collapsing!” sings Paul Buschnegg on the opener “Pompeii”. It somehow fits the band’s cold wave, neo-NDW sound. Immediately afterwards they open “Kiss Me In The Morning”, which starts with its chorus, a chorus that you think you have already heard in several 80s classics with its industrial leanings.
Between completely serious kitsch and sugar coating, cleverness, distant irony and desperation
But breaking expectations seems to be this band’s hobby, because they immediately follow it with some kind of bagpipes and a lyric that culminates in a wonderfully moaning “cry cry cry cry cry cry”. But that shouldn’t hide the fact that Pauls Jets use all the ironic fun and wild, squeaky sound ideas that they pack into their songs to wrap up some pretty ambiguous lyrics that oscillate between completely serious kitsch and icing, cleverness, distant irony and desperation. For example, the punk love story “Smash”, which could also have been produced by Dean Blunt. Or the similarly post-punk “If I Was A Human” and the drunk anthem “Blau”, the perfect outro to come back to earth.
Even though no song is longer than three and a half minutes, and many even stay under the three minute mark, they hardly seem like sketches. Rather, they are incredibly detailed miniatures in which every brush stroke (or in this case: every sound from the synthesizer and every filler word in the lyrics) was thought about in detail. But don’t worry: it doesn’t sound too strenuous, but rather wonderfully casual, amusing and in some moments even Dadaistic. As if Joachim Ringelnatz, with a slight addiction to TikTok, was rhyming about love, urges and the depressing present.
“I fall into a hole, and somehow I think falling is nice,” it says a little later in “Erdmaus”. The world is ending, but instead of resisting it, we find a kind of melancholy solace in simply surrendering to the decay. Or at least Paul Buschnegg and the other Jets do. And isn’t that ultimately the very best thing we can do with the apocalypse that seems to be impending on us?
This review first appeared in Musikexpress 11/2025.