Quirlschlängle / Germany / 2025
PRE-ORDER
If you will, the albums Brannten Schnüre released in three-year intervals form a kind of trilogy of psychological processing. With Landschaft aus Tränen, this cycle finds its conclusion. But what kind of conclusion is it?
In 2019’s Erinnerungen an Gesichter, memories were still veiled in a soft glow, gently idealised and wrapped in nostalgia. By 2022, with Das Glück vermeiden, the tone had shifted. The words turned more bitter, more resigned, searching for language to grasp a personal fate that had grown heavier.
Brannten Schnüre have long cultivated an unmistakable initial sound. Their music is built from collaged fragments, creating a blurred, homely atmosphere – abstract, yet strangely close to something familiar. Listeners often reached for the term folk, though it never quite fit. Dark folk or weird folk were frequently mentioned, yet both labels felt completely inappropriate. They were never really weird, and rarely dark. If anything, there was always a sense of gentle clarity in their work and a kind of subtle healing quality beneath the surface. They also seemed to keep a deliberate distance from the aesthetics and codes of such genres and their surrounding scenes.
With Landschaft aus Tränen, however, something changes. This time, the duo edges closer to a more recognisable genre language, perhaps echoing the acoustic introspection that emerged in mid-1980s post-punk England, when some artists moved toward a sound that was more organic and yearning. Katie and Christian take that impulse and transform it entirely into their own. The chords of the campfire guitar drift off in shoegazy tones, while a sampled girl sobs and groans rather than raising her arms in a dubious gesture of solemn devotion toward the sun.
Still, the album seems to openly acknowledge late-80s/early-90s Current 93, both in sound and spirit. On Streitlust, Brannten Schnüre even tread unmistakable paths of Martial Industrial. Yet thematically, they remain far removed. The lyrics deal with biographical detours, with tears that never found their way out, tears that have since hardened into stone.
This is where the brooding and self-questioning of the earlier albums come to rest. Not in resolution, perhaps, but in the quiet acceptance of a profound sadness – a sadness that has always been the fragile, glowing core of Brannten Schnüre’s music.
It is no secret that this album is not only the final part of a trilogy, but also the final chapter of Brannten Schnüre itself. The project has come to an end. And yet, we are not left empty-handed. A new collaboration between Katie and Christian is already on the horizon. The folk-inflected paths of Landschaft aus Tränen offer a glimpse of where that path might lead.