“We Were Here” – Stuttgart band Die Nerve – Strangely cheerful

As we all know, musical trends come as quickly as they go: a good ten years ago, a genre called “postpunk” was the hottest thing. Not that it was anything entirely new back then – the first post-punk wave had already started 35 years earlier, at the end of the 70s. And yet what was seeping into the periphery nationally and internationally from urban musical centers such as Bristol, London or Stuttgart was carefree, straightforward, exciting and direct. A catalyst of anger that didn’t really know what it was directed against, but that was precisely why it was understood and empathized by so many.

Ten years later, the term is as empty of content as only “indie music” is: it is precisely because it has been used millions of times that it has become so banal and irrelevant. Although there are still new post-punk records every month like a dime a dozen, with a few exceptions the genre has degenerated into a spiral of redundant, minimalist, same-old things: monotonous bass lines, reduced, reverberated single-note guitars, drums as if they were canned and lyrics that sing about their own insensitivity in a self-pitying pose.

It’s different in the case of the band Die Nerve, who helped usher in the postpunk revival at the beginning of the 2010s. The development that the Stuttgart trio around singer and guitarist Max Rieger, bassist Julian Knoth and drummer Kevin Kuhn has made since their debut “Fluidum” in 2012 is remarkable. They have long since broken away from the brutal, angry early phase; Since their 2018 album “Fake” and their self-titled successor, released four years later, the sound of the three has been characterized by a high degree of variance: the dynamics of post-rock, the catchiness of pop and the brutality of noise rock culminate in an unmistakable sonic characteristic . The band has always hated genre labels. Today there is basically no need for this anymore: the band has become its own genre.

The sound mix established on the last two albums is consistently continued on the new work “Wir Waren Hier”. The opener “When I ran away” begins with an intro typical of the band, which reveals their subtle humor: From the background a voice calls out “One, two, three, four”, but what follows is emptiness. The guitar, bass and drums only begin to work together with a delay. In fact, it is difficult to create moments of surprise with the limited stylistic resources of a rock band. However, the nerves always manage to do this with little tricks like this.

Over the course of the album, fast tracks like “The glass breaks and I’m breaking with it”, “Great deeds” or “I don’t want to function anymore” alternate with groovy ones (“We Were Here”, “Bis ans Meer”) and sometimes even ballads moments (“Eighteen”, “Disruption”). There is a threatening, sometimes even apocalyptic underlying mood over all of this, but it is characterized by such an exuberant joy of playing that it leaves you strangely cheerful at the end.

The Nerves: “We Were Here” (Glitterhouse/Indigo)