Isolation Berlin - All grey

Emerging from Berlin's teeming, fertile musical underground, Isolation Berlin have stood out from the start for a personal style forever balanced between indie-pop delicacy and rough, pulsing, nervy post-punk surges, occasionally joined by melodies borrowed from traditional German chanson and from folk songs belted out by a broken heart at the local pub. A bit Element Of Crime, a bit post-punk, a bit Rio Reiser and his legendary politicized Deutschrock band of the Seventies, Ton Steine Scherben, a bit Hamburger Schule, a bit indie-pop: German specialist critics have drawn countless comparisons in an attempt to slot them into some musical lineage. But the truth is that Isolation Berlin are hard to pin down and, in all likelihood, resemble only themselves. They say they play "protopop", though not even they can really explain what that means: it's a term they coined to have a ready answer to music journalists' endless - and, after a while, probably rather tiresome - questions. They don't consider themselves political, feel no need to start or join a youth-culture movement, nor to fit into any "trend" or music scene, which they see as limiting to creativity. They work and write songs as a group, with no outside producer, who, as they told the magazine Musikexpress, would be useless or would only serve bands that have run out of ideas and can't find new musical paths.

From their brilliant debut onward they were praised and loved by German critics, at times singled out as the best band on the contemporary local scene; with their sophomore effort they confirmed their talent and honed their own personal musical formula. Their future as one of the flagship acts on Berlin's Staatsakt label looks decidedly promising.

The band's formation, the early EPs and Annabelle

It all begins when Tobias Bamborschke, born in Cologne but relocated to Berlin at thirteen, decides to cut ties with his circle of friends and happens to meet Max Bauer. The two click right away and soon become practically inseparable, moving into a shared apartment, listening to records and playing music together in their spare time. Things get more serious when they decide to set to music some poems Bamborschke had written after the end of a relationship. From these ideas, Isolation Berlin's first songs are quickly born. These would go on to make up the first two EPs, recorded with the help of a drummer friend. Meanwhile Bauer, who was also playing in the band Die Schlechten Liebhaber, convinces his bandmates David Specht and Simeon Cöster to join Isolation Berlin. In the group's definitive lineup, Specht, besides playing bass, handles mixing and recording (his bandmates jokingly call him the "Soundwizard"), while Cöster is the drummer.

In 2014 the self-produced debut EP, Aquarium, is released, with the band immediately showing a strong knack for writing good vocal melodies, framed by the delicate guitar textures woven by Bauer. The EP consists of four melancholic indie-pop songs with crystalline sounds. Three of them ("Aquarium", "Lisa" and "Rosaorange") deal thematically with the end of a relationship. The title track, also the opener, is probably the most accomplished of this trio. The song describes the afternoons of someone in love, spent in the company of goldfish and cuttlefish at a public aquarium, trying not to think about their beloved any longer. The fresh, immediate melodies and the delicate guitar phrasing help create a sweetly nostalgic veil, in tune with lyrics that are simple and vaguely naive, yet extremely effective at making the listener empathize with the singer's lyrical "I". "Lisa" and the longer "Rosaorange" follow along these same stylistic lines.

"Alles Grau" is the band's first track to attempt to capture the burden of loneliness and the feeling of being immersed in an annihilating greyness through which no glimmer of light seems able to break. Crisp guitar, off-beat keyboard counterpoints, an immediate melody and lyrics that are simple yet effective: despite appearing musically colourful, "Alles Grau" forcefully reveals the loss of dreams, friends and emotions; even the fear of death fades away into a hazy, cold, apathetic reality.

In 2015, Isolation Berlin signed to the Berlin label Staatsakt, run by Maurice Summen, which orbits around some of the most interesting names on the German alternative scene. Their second EP, Körper, released in March of that same year, couldn't be more different. The band abandons the indie-pop delicacy and the chiming guitar jangle and lets its post-punk influences surface: the songs become rougher, sharper and faster, the distorted guitar riffs more insistent, bass and drums more driving, the lyrics more violent, carnal, desperate.

The excellent opener "Der Bus Der Stillen Hoffnung" bears witness to this new direction taken by the band: the distorted guitar and the more aggressive vocals make this love song – whose second verse is, incidentally, rather poetic – pulsing and vibrant. "Prinzessin Borderline" is a two-and-a-half-minute post-punk shard with a melodic chorus. "Körper" (already released as a single in 2014 and on the band's YouTube channel) starts quietly, with a palm-muted accompaniment, and builds to a furious, animalistic final explosion in which the screaming vocal duets with an electric guitar run wild through a wah wah pedal.

There's no let-up in tension on the fourth track either: "Meine Damen Und Herren" is a driving, furious piece of punk-rock. The BPM only drops on the splendid "Isolation Berlin", the final electric ballad, a heartfelt, aching and moving urban elegy that describes the overwhelming, inescapable sense of loneliness and isolation that pervades the German capital — though, as Bamborschke has stated on several occasions, it's a feeling that can be felt anywhere. The nihilism of "Alles Grau" is picked up again, along with its desolation and lack of color (just watch the video), but sketched here with greater despair and suffering anguish, which seems to find release only in the song's closing section, where desperate invocations to Berlin settle over a bed of distorted guitar that verges on shoegaze.

In September 2015, the 7" Annabelle was released, containing the excellent title track and, as a B-side, "Swantje". The two songs, probably born of a happy summer, revisit the indie-pop lightness of the debut EP and replace the bitter lyrics and romantic disappointments with a carefree spirit wholly unusual for the band.

"Annabelle" is infectious and danceable, and soon becomes a staple of their live shows. "Swantje" is all sweetness and colorful flights of love resting on an organ riff seemingly lost in time and recovered from Element Of Crime; the grayness of the city is replaced by blue skies ("seit ich dich kenne/ ist der Himmel wieder blau") and life once again tastes sweet ("seitdem ich dich kenne/ schmeckt das Leben wieder süß").

The debut album and Berliner Schule/Protopop

By the end of 2015, without having yet released a full-length album, Isolation Berlin were already being hailed by critics as one of the most promising bands on the German scene.

The debut album Und Aus Den Wolken Tropft Die Zeit, released in February of the following year, brings together the band's two souls: the indie-pop, chiming-guitar side of Aquarium, and the darker, more impetuous side of Körper. The carefree lightness of Annabelle is but a memory: back come the disheartening melancholy, the urban desolation, the broken hearts and painful breakups fought off with gulps of beer and hard liquor in bars. Bamborschke sharpens his pen, and the themes are handled with ever more resigned disillusionment. In a 2016 interview, the band stated that, although they had no intention of writing a concept album, the record can be read as an emotional journey, one that begins by wanting to embrace the world and be embraced by it in turn ("Produkt", in which one can also glimpse a critique of contemporary consumer society and the peddling of artistic "products"), before, following disappointing romantic experiences and the realization of just how cruel existence can be, drawing away from it and plunging into a black depression so deep it turns the heart to stone (the closing, cynical "Herz aus Stein").

Und Aus Den Wolken Tropft Die Zeit follows a three-part structure. The first part contains the most immediate, pop-oriented tracks ("Fahr weg", "Aufstehn, losfahrn"), which follow the path laid out by Aquarium and Annabelle; the central core is nervy and pulsing, picking up the urban post-punk of Körper; the third part, aside from the mad outburst of "Wahn", features milder rhythms and cleaner sounds.

The gorgeous guitar jangle of "Fahr weg", a staple of their live shows, and the pop sensibility of "Aufstehn, losfahrn" attest to Isolation Berlin's full command of their craft, striking a perfect balance between nostalgia and lively, sparkling music. The driving funk-rock of "Verschließe dein Herz" blends anger at society with romantic disillusionment; the jittery, noisy "Ich küss Dich" externalizes an inability to feel anything at all – Bamborschke's vocal delivery swings between anger and apathy – reducing kisses and embraces to purely carnal encounters.

"Ich Wünschte, Ich Könnte" revisits the desire, already made explicit in "Produkt", to please people. But while in the opening track this came across as a kind of statement of intent, here it appears as a desperate plea (so much so that the final line expresses the wish to never wake up again). The song is built on the same model as "Körper", but refines its sound and its pulsing crescendo, which spills into the final solo. The alt-rock of "Wahn", on the other hand, is the most unhinged track on the record, all noisy distortion and a great vocal performance perfectly in tune with the lyrics, which describe the onset of a moment of hallucinatory madness (Wahn, precisely) and dissociation from one's own body; the result is alienating and completely overwhelms the listener.

The ballads, which at times seem to recall early Element Of Crime, are well-crafted, playing on dynamics of quiet and loud, and drift languidly through the bitter world sketched out by Bamborschke's lyrics. "Schlachtensee" (a lake just outside Berlin) and "Du hast mich nie geliebt" describe the difficulty of living and the lack of motivation felt after being dumped by the one you love. But while the first song at least retained the radiant natural beauty of the snow-covered lake, in the second nothing remains but an existence lived between alcohol and cigarettes, and "a song that wrote itself".

Bamborschke's lyrical, singer-songwriter style has by now become firmly established, and one can see how his disheartened worldview condenses into lyrics that are refined, yes, but that also combine an elevated, poetic register with raw, direct elements typical of spoken language. The effect is especially striking in the moments where the two different linguistic registers collide, lending greater substance to the impossibility of finding emotional peace amid the grayness of urban reality.

Alongside the debut, the album Berliner Schule/Protopop was released, collecting the two previous EPs and featuring two previously unreleased covers. The first is "Fall In Love Mit Mir" by Nina Hagen, a figurehead of the more commercial side of German new wave. The track is really more of a divertissement, but it shows off the band's openness to a range of musical styles. The second cover is "Isolation" by Joy Division, here reworked with the lyrics reproduced in German.

Vergifte Dich: the second album

In 2018, after two years of recording silence, the band released Vergifte Dich, their second album. The "surprise effect" had worn off, but the record proves to be a highly cohesive and mature work, containing some of the band's finest songs to date ("Marie", "Kicks", "Antimaterie"). It follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, further refining the band's musical formula and showing the artistic maturity Isolation Berlin had achieved. A few new elements are also introduced: electronics are used more heavily, creating dense sonic beds (as in the ballads "Melchiors Traum" and "Vergeben heißt nicht vergessen"), acoustic guitar becomes the main accompanying instrument (again in "Vergeben heißt nicht Vergessen"), and the band's frantic, urban pulse is also slowed down at times ("Wenn Ich Eins Hasse, Dann Ist Das Mein Leben").

Overall, Vergifte Dich is darker and more nocturnal than the debut, with a particularly dense atmosphere hanging over the whole record, as if a thick fog had descended on Berlin, blotting out the moon and the starry sky and leaving the city in a piercing, impenetrable darkness. Likewise, the lyrics become, if anything, even more despairingly nihilistic: the delirious "Vergifte Dich" plunges into an abyss of desolation and almost seems to suggest poisoning by drugs as the only practical solution to the pain of the soul (Seelenschermz). Even the band's trademark delicate indie-pop takes on increasingly dark, bluish shades: "Marie" sets a darker verse against the band's classic, crystalline guitar jangle, while the slower "Antimaterie" describes a longing for laughter and a moment of pure joy that remain out of reach because of the "antimatter" filling the heart.

Some of the ballads grow sparser and more minimal: the hallucinatory "Melchiors Traum", which ties thematically back to "Wahn", the poignant and poetic "Vergeben Heißt Nicht Vergessen" - perhaps the album's best track - and the closing "Mir Träumte".

The ballads "Serotonin", in which echoes of traditional chanson and Element Of Crime resurface, and "In Deinen Armen", probably the weakest track on the record but one that surprises with the unexpected noise textures of its instrumental coda, stick instead to the band's typical formula. The most relentless, furious bursts of energy are placed towards the end of the album this time: "Die Leute" is warm and rock-solid, with a riff big enough to make the most recent Muse jealous, while the splendid, pulsing "Kicks" could easily have come off a new new wave record from the previous decade. Worth noting, finally, is the increasingly well-defined production work, which lends cohesion to the whole album and reinforces the dark atmosphere permeating the songs.

Isolation Berlin's music wallows in sadness and in a nihilistic, depressive streak; the world around them is apathetic, flat. Germany's great Hauptstadt is painted through a different, opaque filter, and its wild parties, its bustling nightlife and social scene, the frenzied lights of a city where everything exists, could not feel further away. Yet, in this depressing, afflicting world, beauty peeks through in melancholy melodies, impetuous rhythms and liberating screams, and some colours seem to bloom amid the surrounding grey. The four musicians have forged a personal, recognisable style and sonic blend. Back home they're a beloved act, hailed by critics: the hope is that the band's sensitivity and talent will remain intact in the years to come.

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