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“My Good Friend Died, Your Son was Born.” This line has it all. Malte Huck neutely mumbles in the unpretentious acoustic song “You must be out of your mind”, which is stylistically one of the simplest pieces in his debut. “In principle, the entire album is overshadowed by this sentence. The background to this line is the death of a very good friend. I wanted to take the chance to accommodate it in a song that is very light. This position also appears in the middle of the stanza, not in the chorus.” Has-Been has some stumbling blocks, even in harmonious songs, it is about sensitive topics. The musician from Leipzig negotiates harmful habits, but also his depression.
Your own story
It took the 31-year-old to raise his own story. While the lyrics of his last EP (2023) still vaguely appealed, he now openly strips the topic in the LO-Fi-Piano pop “Stand-Up Comedy”. This also happens in a humorous form. “I even want certain elements in my music. But it shouldn’t be Klamaukig. It is very difficult to find this balance when writing. That is why the song also bears this title: stand-up is an art form that is very underestimated.” Huck also approaches his childhood, also sings about regrets and mistakes. You often get the impression that he addresses his former self in some passages.
Despite the contestability and allusions to his heroes Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley, Has-Been is not a puristic singer/songwriter album. Huck wrote all songs on the guitar or the piano. But you can also hear samples, noise, rough drums and abrupt cuts from production. “The texts are partly about bad experiences, that should also be reflected in the sound. Sometimes it should be uncomfortable. I wanted you to hear the breath and cracker. Everything should look a bit unmistaked, but in this disorder I curated a lot.”
“Maybe it is also important that you can be sad when you are sad”
The warm and melodic folk pop song “Leaving the Band” sounds the cleanest, which you can read as a melancholic reappraisal of the time after Huck’s exit from AnnenMayKantereit: someone left a big band and now sings over their own small world. But the text is ambivalent. It is also about black artists such as Drake and Kendrick Lamar, whose biographies or promotion stories have nothing to do with Huck’s circumstances. “I can look at my own story in the context of social injustices or privileges. Only what do I do the moment when I just feel bad? Maybe it is also important that you can be sad if you are sad. Afterwards it can be reflected. But I am aware that contextualization can be a privilege.”
Huck processes its twenties on Has-Been with self-lemen sounds and introverted texts. And also sees into the future: “I stopped to count the Numbers and then i started to dream again” is a line. “I dream of not measuring myself and my art anymore how often a song is clicked. Because that doesn’t decide whether it is good or bad.”