A name is often the first thing we learn to answer to. Much of life follows the same script: someone calls, we respond, and, over time, the response takes on the shape of a personality. Family, work, lovers, and paperwork each add their own directions, until the name begins to read like a job description. There’s a peculiar freedom in slipping free of a word burdened with everyone else’s expectations. Who would remain once the introductions fell silent?
German darkwave artist fremder and Greek producer coldblood pursue that question on namenlos, their new collaborative single and the title track of fremder’s forthcoming album. Written and produced together in Thessaloniki, Greece, the song considers the distance between the person we are and the person everybody has agreed we ought to be, setting that discomfort against an exceptionally catchy arrangement of synthesizers, drum machines, and forceful German vocals.
Buzzy synth figures bounce back and forth through generous reverb, answering each other in short, insistent exchanges. A metallic knocking interrupts the conversation before a sharp vocal grunt sets off the full synthpunk attack. The drumbeat lands thick and heavy beneath a voice that oozes dark theatricality, the German lyrics delivered with an almost percussive force. Warbling electronics keep the atmosphere uneasy even as the rhythm makes an excellent case for surrendering to the dancefloor.
There is a pagan charge to the beat’s repetition and the voice’s near-incantatory delivery, a suggestion of bodies gathering around something considerably older than a synthesizer. The hooks come quickly, while the vocal makes its existential agitation impossible to mistake for idle contemplation. You can dance to the prospect of disappearing here, though the question at the song’s center keeps pulling you back into yourself:
“Wie werde ich meinen Namen los?”
“How do I lose my name?”
The song’s stark black-and-white video by Fogg sets fremder’s restless performance against monumental concrete cylinders, hard-edged walls, and the repeating balconies of modernist buildings. In a dark coat and black lipstick, he gestures toward the camera, flings his head back, then moves in until his face floods the frame. A blur of motion keeps unsettling his features, while the brutalist architecture remains rigid and severe. The contrast gives the song’s anxiety a striking form: a person trying to slip beyond recognition in a world made of straight lines and repeating shapes.
At one point, a concrete aperture becomes a frame within the frame, reducing the performer to a face glimpsed through its geometry. Elsewhere, grass and trees soften the hard surfaces, opening up space around his movements. His performance brings all the agitation these otherwise impassive places require.
Watch the video for namenlos below:
A producer, songwriter, videographer, and tattoo artist, fremder directs the musical and visual aspects of his project under the description black romanticism. His emphasis on existential lyrics and freedom from external expectations carries through a practice spanning coldwave, post-punk, and darkwave. coldblood, whose recent debut is titled So Lonely in My Tower, brings his own experimental post-punk and darkwave approach to their collaboration.
Listen to namenlos via streaming here. Vinyl, merchandise, and album pre-orders are available through the official fremder shop.
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