Five new artists lighting DAF’s synth-punk fire
Of all the original pioneers of Germany’s Neue Deutsche Welle, the DAF duo likely stands as the scene’s most exemplary force.
Emerging concurrently with the broader post-punk firing off across Europe and the States, Gabi Delgado-López and Robert Görl struck a captivatingly frantic intersection between disco and the electronic avant-garde.
An acronym for Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and initially an experimental industrial ensemble, the so-called ‘Virgin Trilogy’ would burnish in the punk world the enduring image of the pair. Brawny, primal, and oiled radiations of testosterone and alien sexuality, López’s unabashed physical on-stage pummel in weird, visceral synergy with Görl’s martial percussion duties.
The sounds crafted were equally as sinewy. Taut, vascular sequencers convulse with proto-techno panic, atonal synths rushing and surging against bizarre drum patterns and sputtering keyboards. With studio assistance from famed producer Conny Plank, Alles ist Gut, Gold und Liebe, and Für Immer would stand as DAF’s crowning triptych, strange gems of the synthpop explosion that radiated illicit energy and uniquely askance popcraft.
DAF, and the wider NDW movement, has left an impression on vast swathes of music in Germany and beyond. But naturally, the pair’s wry brashness has its fingerprints on much of today’s electronic punk scene, including even many in their home country. Celebrating DAF’s legacy while also lifting the veil on the vanguard of synthpunk’s latest permutation, we take a look at five artists any DAF fan missing their old magic must hear immediately.
Five new artists lighting DAF’s new wave fire:
Pink Stiletto
Drawing from San Francisco’s rich well of synthpunk and belligerent electronics, Pink Stiletto cut icy dancefloor slabs of punchy EBM that radiate with a neon pop glow, yet always prickling with a fraught bite, its teeth bared, ready to bite.
Formed from the ashes of the more kitschy Deux Nomiz punk group, Valery Kvochkova and Yuri Todorov strut amid the city’s underground with oozing confidence, straddling the dark edge between post-punk and disco decadence with ease.
What makes Pink Stiletto really work is its wry humour. Just as Deux Nomiz leaned into B-52 style colourful affront, Kvochkova flexes her new project like a darker mirror to her former project, hiding eccentricities beneath the mechanised soundscapes, from club-lite beats to odd detuned synth-lines, all clashing with fractious energy.
Boasting a string of banging EPs already, Pink Stiletto looked set to score many an alternative night to come.
Güner Künier
Infectious sequencers and somatic arpeggios all entrance each of Güner Künier’s livewire cuts. Minimal but pugnaciously leaping out of the speakers with brawny attitude, Güner Künier scores Berlin’s subterranean with feverish fizz with just as much essentiality as DAF over 40 years ago.
The techno pulse is often wrapped in Güner Künier’s abrasive guitar attack, coating the clubland skulk in a rusty twang of inside-out rock heft that marks a distinct character in the post-punk crowd.
There’s a promise of a mad night out the moment any of Güner Künier’s numbers first hit. Titling her second album Yaramaz, meaning “good-for-nothing” in her Turkish birth tongue, an impish good time glows from her electro-brew, songs that surge and bristle with a magnetic pull toward the old Prussian capital’s rollcall of electric venues and all-night parties.
Fiercely punk but imbued with dollops of dancefloor skulk, Güner Künier transports us to the 1980s’ NDW with authenticity.
Donzii
There are many ingredients bubbling away in Los Angeles’ Donzii’s art-pop soup. While keenly tethered to DAF’s alloyed punk edge, Donzii’s expanded palette subsumes a vast array of flavours that make songwriter Jenna Balfe and multi-instrumentalist Dennis Fuller impossible to categorise.
Industrial muscle, no wave mutant-disco, and even a little absurdist theatre all shroud Donzii’s psychotropic synthpop reverie.
Just as DAF flirts with cavernous bruise around their atonal pop blasts, Donzii similarly faces the world’s dark tumult with a disjointed but sprightly eagerness to laugh at the evils of the world, “like watching sweet little pink flowers grow atop a pile of decaying bones and compost”, Balfe once stated. Every number Donzii dreams up seems to be packed with evocative charge, swirling with surrealist mania yet viscerally snapping and crackling with the basest grooves and fiery urgency.
Das Beat
They make it clear exactly what they’re after by the name alone. An electronic duo from the ever-beckoning Berlin comprised of singer Eddie Rabenberger and producer Alexander Cowan, “The Beat” adopts a frantic and hazardous plane of synthpop croon. Some songs thrash around the room, others adopt a more cooing, seductive engulf, and occasionally the pair wander into dreamier realms of contemplation. Yet underneath such disparate flourish is the coveted worship of the holy beat, always anchoring their popcraft to a propulsive slap of swaggering escape.
While nods to DAF’s heyday course throughout, as well as a broader love for that special cluster of early 1980s new wave, Das Beat can also just easily jump into ethereal indie and even slight ripples of ambient wash at its most digital, conjuring a shimmering sound that touches on a tessellating mosaic of styles, ensuring their synthpop slink never grows stale.
Cosey Mueller
Whatever’s in the Berlin air, punk and synths seemed to find the perfect marriages in the German capital’s rich, musical tapestry.
Cosey Mueller can count herself as another of the city’s dazzling synthesists. Originally from the Das Das duo and lending keys to the hardcore group Glaas, Mueller has been crafting a string of solo records that craft urgent post-punk gems that shimmer with electrical spark and slithering, motorik beats. Dipped in coldwave frost but without the aloof frigidity, Mueller’s arsenal of synth blasts worm their way into your dancing shoes with welcome invasion.
It’s a flair Mueller shares with DAF in their classic pomp, wrestling hooky earworms from an unknown ether that appears plucked from the esoteric depths while destined for the charts. Albeit firmly ensconced in the underground, Mueller’s driving pulse similarly glows with palpably exotic and infectious grip.
