The Frisian punk band moves to the big city. Spoiler: It’s kind of shit there too.
On the cover of ALTER ZORN you see a young man with a leather jacket and a good mood. It is Moses Schneider, who was probably in his late twenties at the time the photo was taken. Schneider has produced many albums by Tocotronic and Turbostaat. The sound engineer, who is said to be able to masterfully capture the live energies of bands, also took care of their new record. He has also achieved this with this work.
At the same time, the cover leads on the wrong track, because the lyrical self in the new Turbostaat songs doesn’t appear to be in a good mood like the young tailor. It’s about anger, unbroken pessimism and a seemingly dystopian present. So everything is as usual? No: Low German sayings are now rarer and Jan Windmeier sings for the first time about urban hustle and bustle, while the previous song was about the outskirts (islands and marshes off the North Frisian mainland).
Now it’s sometimes about people without shelter: “Isolations” tells of ignored fates, frozen fingers and drug addiction. Private topics such as coping with grief are also discussed rather cryptically (“Everyman’s End”). In between there are more concrete emotional outbursts: “It’s lonely here without you,” it says in “Nachtschimmel”. Musically, this album also oscillates between loud postpunk and raw indie rock. The last seconds on ALTER ZORN, however, are a surprising, loud laugh from the rehearsal room. That was probably Moses Schneider.
You can find out which albums will be released in January 2025 via our monthly release list.