The Notwist Returns: Embracing Collective Creation on 'News from Planet Zombie'
Markus Acher reflects with a sense of surprise: "It all went so fast. We've never been this fast at making a record." The founder of the influential Bavarian band The Notwist sits in their Munich studio, alongside his brother Micha Acher and bandmate Cico Beck. For a group renowned for meticulous, layered studio craftsmanship, speed represents an entirely new creative sensation.
From Heavy Metal Origins to Indietronica Pioneers
Formed in 1989 in the small Bavarian town of Weilheim, The Notwist began as a heavy metal trio before undergoing a remarkable evolution. Over the subsequent decade, they transformed into one of Germany's most sonically distinctive musical acts. Their seminal 2002 album, Neon Golden, masterfully fused indie songwriting with intricate electronic textures, largely shaped by then-member Martin Gretschmann (also known as Console or Acid Pauli).
The album's unique blend of introspective atmosphere and expansive sound earned it critical acclaim far beyond German borders, securing The Notwist a permanent place in the early-2000s indie experimental canon. Pitchfork notably named Neon Golden one of the best albums of the 2000s.
A Counterpoint to German Musical Export
At the heart of The Notwist's sound has always been Markus Acher's voice: soft, fragile, and unmistakably accented. His Bavarian inflection, delivering lyrics that hover between poetic understatement and deep melancholy, presented a powerful counter-image to the bombastic, industrial strength often associated with exported German music.
Where bands like the commercially successful, yet controversial, Rammstein symbolized one extreme of the Teutonic musical coin—characterized by brutality, hardness, and provocative spectacle—The Notwist have consistently represented another, more introspective facet of Germanness. Their music is rooted in emotional restraint, intellectual curiosity, and a deep, romantic sense of worldly melancholy, evoking figures like Goethe, Schumann, and the painter Caspar David Friedrich rather than louder cultural exports.
Continuous Reconfiguration and a New Communal Ethos
Nearly 25 years after their breakthrough, the Acher brothers remain the constant core of The Notwist, while everything around them has continually shifted. The band relocated from Weilheim to Munich, underwent lineup changes, and persistently reconfigured their sound across genres including grunge, indie rock, electronica, trip-hop, krautrock, and jazz.
Their previous album, 2021's Vertigo Days, embraced collaboration as its central method, featuring artists like Angel Bat Dawid and Ben LaMar Gay. This outward-looking impulse deepens significantly on their tenth studio album, News from Planet Zombie. However, the album's true significance lies as much in its revolutionary creation process as in its final sound.
Rejecting Digital Isolation for Shared Physical Space
Known for spending long periods "tinkering" with every audio detail, The Notwist made a conscious, emotional decision to abandon remote file-sharing and digital isolation—a mode intensified during the pandemic—and return to physical, collective creation. News from Planet Zombie was recorded over a single, intensive week at Import Export, a former industrial building in Munich now serving as a nonprofit arts space, performance venue, and community canteen.
"It was an experiment," Markus Acher admits. For the first time since their earliest records, the band played together live in one room. "More or less live," he clarifies. "Suddenly we were already done." The experiment proved profoundly successful, fostering a dynamic, open environment where friends and collaborators flowed in and out of sessions.
- Munich-based American photographer Enid Valu contributed vocals.
- Haruka Yoshizawa, half of Acher's DJ duo Alien DJs, played taishōgoto and harmonium.
- Shanghai-born, Munich-based clarinettist Tianping Christoph Xiao joined in.
- Jazz musician Mathias Götz added trombone parts.
"Sometimes there were people listening in during lunch," Micha Acher notes. "That's very different from a strict, isolated studio environment."
A Tactile, Warm, and Radically Present Record
The result is an album that feels remarkably tactile, exposed, and human. Planet Zombie possesses a warmer, rougher-edged quality than its meticulously polished predecessors. Its spatial characteristics are emphasized, not smoothed away. Listeners can hear the air moving around instruments and musicians reacting to one another in real time.
After years where music, like much of life, was mediated through screens, this album is a deliberate insistence on physical presence. "During Covid, we were sitting in this room, working alone," Markus Acher explains. "We invited collaborators, but everyone was alone in front of their computers. That didn't feel right anymore." Recording collectively became a way of reclaiming what was lost during lockdown: proximity, spontaneous coincidence, and genuinely shared time.
The Quiet Politics of Togetherness
This insistence is not accidental but a pointed response to a broader cultural moment. "We felt the need to come together and not separate ourselves," Acher states. While The Notwist have rarely been overtly political, Planet Zombie carries a quiet political charge in its steadfast refusal of isolation. It subtly rejects the frictionless, disembodied digital logic that the pandemic era accelerated.
The album's title hints at a deep-seated cultural unease. Zombies, after all, represent figures of numb survival, trapped between states of life and death. Acher resists providing a direct, simplistic message. "Even when it feels like the world is collapsing," he reflects, "life continues. People still meet and make things happen." He suggests that horror has always been a vessel for processing collective, primal fears and giving shape to otherwise nameless anxieties.
Life Between Bodies in Rooms
So, who populates this "planet zombie"? "Isn't it strange how simple things often are?" Acher muses. "That people with power are driven by greed, by basic impulses?" The album deliberately leaves such questions unresolved. Its lyrics stay true to the band's longstanding preoccupation with alienation and dislocation, offering poetic fragments rather than political slogans.
If the album possesses a stance, it lies less in what it explicitly says and more in what it embodies and does. In a period still haunted by the ghosts of lockdown—by screens, solitude, and the low-level dread of interruption—Planet Zombie feels almost radical in its modest, human-scale ambition. You can hear people sharing air, time, and uncertainty. There are no grand gestures here, only the powerful insistence that authentic life and creativity happen between bodies in shared rooms.
The Notwist suggest that if we indeed inhabit a planet of zombies, the cure may be as ordinary, and simultaneously as profoundly difficult, as simply opening the doors, gathering together, and playing on. News from Planet Zombie is out now on Morr Music.
