The brain really wants to assign certain music to a genre. There’s hardly anything you can do about it. The first listening impression is often clear, then everything gets tangled up, you get confused, you think you’ve heard the whole thing before in one way or another, and you look for bands and records that the pieces seem to be based on in some way.
With the Hamburg band Shatten I think I hear a mixture of Tocotronic, Kraftklub and the Editors. Because their album GEGENWART not only tries to reflect their styles musically, but also, like those mentioned, lyrically wanders around in the scary moors of our climatic and political situation.
Loose ends, humor: none
You don’t want to get lost, you try to describe things in such a way that clarity emerges, but at the same time a form of lyrical ambition shines through, which in its looseness sometimes (of course not always) creates crooked images. Ultimately it’s all a matter of taste and perception, but it’s not my cup of tea. You can almost always agree with the messages, which are always accompanied by anthemic choruses in the style of Thees Uhlmann. Lines like: “Ideals used up, dreams preserved. Violence is a language, yes, we have optimized it” (“Wuppertal”) but leave a stale feeling.
Loose ends, humor: none. But these two are the most powerful tools when it comes to working on the meta level. Shatten offer solid German postpunk with sprinkles of new wave and world-weary lyrics. Why not, I can imagine it very well live, but somehow it doesn’t really work over the length of the album.
This review appears in Musikexpress 4/2026.
