NOTWIST - News From Planet Zombie

Years go by, experience piles up, and yet some things never seem to change. The sound of Notwist, for instance, despite its refinements and the various experiments carried out mainly by the Acher brothers in side projects, tends to renew itself while remaining faithful to its core. A formula honed after the indie-rock beginnings marked by hardcore/metal/grunge roots, starting with "12" and made immortal thanks to the unsurpassed masterpiece "Neon Golden". It now returns five years on from the fine "Vertigo Days", preceded a few months ago by the release of "Magnificent Fall" (2025, Alien Transistor), an interesting collection of rarities, remixes and salvaged tracks from various EPs.

"News From Planet Zombie" is thus a new chapter under the banner of continuity, this time reclaiming some of the band's more distant past. First of all in the choice to record with the members of their live collective, involving the musicians in the arrangement process of the songs. A quick process, lasting just one week at Import Export studios, the non-profit space in Munich to which the band has been tied for years. And then, above all, in the return to a choral, electric dimension, driven by reflections on an increasingly chaotic world, whose ugliness is likened to that of horror B-movies populated by hordes of the living dead.

"X-Ray" - the album's first single - already showcased this tendency, bringing back to mind the energetic outbursts of "12", just as the bittersweet progress of "The Turning", with its instrumental coda, echoes in structure and atmosphere the pop-rock of "Kong", from "Close To The Glass". In this retracing of their own history, there's naturally room for the grace of their softer melodies, led by Marcus's superb voice ("Snow", "Who We Used To Be"), and for their taste for the intersection of pop and experimentation ("Propeller").

The novelty of the record lies instead in a double tribute: a cover that transports Lovers' "How The Story Ends" into the Notwist universe, and above all another that overhauls, revitalizing it, the bare-bones folk of Neil Young's "Red Sun".

No news, good news, one might say, especially since innovation isn't always necessary to convince. What's missing, once again, is a real standout, that one track that rises above the rest to represent the whole. A venial sin, though, one that doesn't undermine the merit of a journey between bursts of energy and hushed tones, aiming to rediscover the taste for local synergy while overcoming the limits of a condition that would have us alone and distant.

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18/03/2026