Onyon: Leipzig post-punks conjure disquiet ease amid the weird
From the fringes of the Leipzig underground, indie post-punk quartet Onyon have been conjuring a beguilingly infectious slice of Saxon-prairie jangle, and standing as one of the finest bands from Germany’s rich musical history in recent memory.
Anyone who’s been paying attention since 2022’s eponymous debut EP and the following year’s The Last Day on Earth album will know just how stirringly earwormy Onyon are.
Dwelling in a weird realm of skewed cowpunk Americana and synth-flecked wiry minimalism, every Onyon piece the quartet dream up, including the equally excellent ILLO solo project from guitarist Ilka Kellner, feels fed through some aural mangle, warping and twisting their garage lo-fi into misshapen, atonal oddities that inhabit the same sonic weirdness as Snooper or Prison Affair. Drenched in sinuous mania, Onyon manages to conjure an exhilarating sense of alien drama from their pared-down, half-digested no wave stomp.
Such an askance aura to their work perhaps owes much to their healthy doses of naivety when first forming. “At first, it was just for fun, because some of us couldn’t play an instrument at all, or at least not the instrument we now play in the band,” Onyon tells Far Out when casting their mind back to their enthusiastic yet wide-eyed beginnings. “We also had the same idea of what we wanted to sound like, a kind of wavy, dark, punk simplicity. Not too serious, nor ridiculous. We quickly realised that it was a lot of fun to write songs together, hang out, and that people actually liked it.”
In the last two years since The Last Day on Earth, Onyon had been busy in the rehearsal room, eager to get to know their material and spend a more immersive time recording the latest album over the previously rushed sessions. Dropped on the always interesting Swish Swash Records and Mangel Records, new album Pale Horses furthers their gift for electrically rousing indie while coated in spiky electronics and rootsy garage thump. Everybody gels with spooky alchemy as majestically as ever, be it Kellner’s twitchy guitar twang, Maria Untheim’s foggy keys, Mario Pongratz’s skulking drum shuffle, and Florian Schmidt’s double bass and harmonica threat.
Thematically, Pale Horses steps away from the heavier dread that clouded their LP debut. “Our new album is much more mysterious, dystopian, with lyrics that are perhaps less dark and follow a common thread,” Onyon states. “The last album was heavily influenced by the fact that we didn’t take enough time for ourselves, that war broke out in Ukraine, and that there was a general feeling of powerlessness. It felt like the last days on earth. And we think that we have basically evolved now.”
The big bad world still has its effect, however. “The human impact on nature is a big thing,” Onyon tells us when asked about what inspires their songwriting. “We take those themes and blur them. The lyrics are not meant to be specifically socially critical or political, but they always are in a cryptic and dystopian way. The songs should transport the feeling in a timeless and universal language so they can always be interpreted ambiguously. The lyrics are a kind of escape or hope for something supernatural and redeeming.”
In their strange way, a cathartic vapour indeed flows from Pale Horses, a swaddling energy that mines a disquieting soothe from their surrealist punk gristle. Just as previous records pointed toward nocturnal planes of buzzing trill and soaringly hooky heft, Onyon have once again delivered a record that dances all things at once, haunted by apparitional unease, genuinely stirring moments of dreamy indie, and just the right amount of droll irreverence.
With another fantastic album behind them, it’s surely only a matter of time before Onyon’s tricksome post-punk world finds new homes in the weirder corners of music far beyond Leipzig’s “Hölle an der Saale” underground, and it can’t come any sooner.
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