When you look back like that, and you do that automatically when a familiar band releases a new album, you sometimes realize what you hadn’t completely forgotten over the years, but had somehow suppressed. WENN ES LOVE IST reminds you that of all the Hamburg School bands, Die Sternen was the one that grooved best. With distance.
And this time Frank Spilker and his colleagues are relying heavily on this basic groove. There are songs like “GNZRZND” that aren’t actually songs at all, but just an endless grooving groove over which Spilker throws snatches of sentences, maybe even a few rhyming lines. Or in “Let’s ever change the chord” we groove, groove and groove some more until Frank Spilker finally starts to hope: “Maybe it would be good and reason would prevail.”
Is it still postpunk or already Krautrock?
Is it still postpunk or already Krautrock? It doesn’t matter, as long as Spilker does what hardly anyone else can do over this groove: picks up on social conditions, doesn’t analyze them, but touches on them, slips into roles, asks questions and refuses answers, but above all tries to break out of his bubble without letting it burst straight away. It explores the isolation and depoliticization of the subject (“fan of something”), the brave new digital world (“easy on prescription”), toxic masculinity, the shift to the right and somehow everything (“I won’t accept the office”).
And even if it goes back into the bubble again, when Spilker not only recapitulates his own role in the indie niche in “I haven’t done anything (except further)”, but the band also reactivates the exciting FunkPop from the time of their biggest hits at the end of the 90s, the song ends up lost in a seemingly directionless improvisation. Consequently, the album ends with “Still speechless”, which is consequently an instrumental.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.