SCHWACH – Kälter

Description

SCHWACH has been around for almost ten years now. In hardcore years that’s at least sixty: time to retire, or not? Six years after the first LP, “Kein Bock”, and over two years since the last sign of life a split EP with DESARRAIGO from Colombia
the band now releases their second album, “Ka?lter”. Ten years is a long time, not only for a hardcore band. When SCHWACH s tood in their Berlin rehearsal room for the first time, Donald Trump was only a reality TV star, the most right
wing party in the Bundestag was the CSU and the letter combination COVID had no meaning for most of us. The guys in the rehearsal room were different, too. They were younger in some cases, only in their early or midtwenties. Today they
are all in their thirties, and the lives they lead are, for most of them, completely different. More work, greater responsibility, less time for what really matters. And that’s exactly what “K
a?lter” is about. In the album’s twelve songs, SCHWACH talks about the attempt to remain true to oneself and critical of the prevailing conditions in a diverse and multilayered way. The songs deal with political rage as well as personal loss and the strength it can give you when you feel that you are not alone: others feel the same way
and are fighting in the same struggles. Be they on the barricades, on a stage, or in front of it. “Punk is still the coolest thing,” it says in “Three Chords,” the last song of the LP. But punk is more than just that. Punk, as SCHWACH lives it, is also a necessary corrective against the shittiness of the world and a charging cable for
the battery of individual resistance.
The music is exact ly what hardcore should be today if it wants to be more than cliche? ridden classic rock. At its core SCHWACH still plays nothing less than extremely pissed off youth crew hardcore. But around this core, the band builds something that goes far beyond the b
oundaries of standard hardcore. There are midtempo songs, guest vocals from friends from Oslo (Erik, Modern Love), Hamburg (Pan, Bad Affair) and Madrid (Je?sus Acuerdo), and repeatedly genre atypical sound colors.
SCHWACH 2022 sounds much more mature th
an SCHWACH 2013. Still, the band has not lost an ounce of its uncompromising anger and its exuberant energy. They have become older, maybe even grown up. But they are still exactly the kind of hardcore band that this fucked-up, beautiful world needs.