A fascination that started at random on YouTube has grown into the kind of familiarity that feels like home. Caught on my monitor is a still from the band’s atypically clean-edged video to the über-thoughtful low-toned Weiße Wand.
[Intro]
You know what can be life-altering? When music you hear for the first time sounds both new and familiar. It’s as if you’ve been ready for it, waiting for it, standing by to respond to its exact frequencies and intentions. You hear it even once and something very right and very bright snaps into place.
The first time this happened (though I wouldn’t realize it until decades later) I was a fourth grader, and the voice on the cassette my mom played at breakfast was Greg Brown’s. In college the jolt was Morphine and Mark Sandman’s deep-water lows, thick with charisma and ennui. A decade later—Devendra Banhart’s melodious glow and his singular capacity for decorating drama with exuberance. Later came a fascination with Andrew Bird’s earnest ironies—and the ways they’re sung, whistled, and pizzicatoed with such virtuosity. And there was that one song by the enigmatic duo Okou, heard fleetingly and victoriously found again, to fill rooms with its wistful glow thereafter. Sure, I’ve liked as many artists as the next girl, but I’m talking about the ones on the soundtrack to life itself. Only a few make that list.
[Theme]
The most recent of these heart-piercing discoveries came on a Tuesday in February, not long before a global pandemic arrived to stay. I was on YouTube, looking up cover versions of Just Dropped In, when Tom’s Diner appeared in the queue, by two whole bands I didn’t know. Here’s something I haven’t heard in a while, I remember thinking, and there’s that squared-meets-not font on the title card.
It wasn’t just Henning’s astonishing baritone*, in equal parts coarse and smooth (the same might be said of his appearance)—but also the energy among this crowd of musicians. The ease and lightness in that room were hypnotic. The unassuming simplicity of the video felt fresh and free. And the softly woke way a houseful of guys let Suzanne Vega’s lady lyrics have the stage—now this was just plain cool.
It turned out that (Christian) Annen, (Henning) May, (Severin) Kantereit, and (the “unbilled”) Malte Huck are one band, and that the other guy with the great face and the reedy tenor is Frederik Rabe, vocalist for Giant Rooks, another emerging international sensation from Nordrhein-Westfalen. One hour and two dozen clicks later, it was clear that this other band was great but not for me, whereas AnnenMayKantereit was the sort of discovery I usually make once or twice in a decade.
[Key]
They’re a band from Köln. To imagine them as “from Cologne” or “z Kolonii” suggests they come from some fancy place for grown-ups. They don’t. They’re from a raw German city, its days overwhelmingly grey and its name as blunt and lowbrow as teenagers busking in a street. In fact, busking is what they did before they became a thing, and it could be argued that you can take the boys out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the boys. Whatever they wanted to share or gain when they were performing in Zülpicher Straße—it seems that’s what they’re giving and getting still, playing the big shows and posting the videos that get fifteen million views.
[Genre]
They’re a rock band with a name that belongs on a jazz trio, but there’s four of them now, creating a playful, blues-inflected rock with a dark, rough edge that for me never crosses the line into depressing or noisy. Thus, I reject the comparisons made elsewhere online to Nirvana. Tuneful and lyrical, this is music with a surprising amount of softness and sophistication, as well as an exciting degree of genre-bending range. Slow or fast, serious or light, they are electrifying together. And from down-in-the-dirt blues to no-jokes rap to a cappella Janis, May makes it all his.
A Venn diagram might show AnnenMayKantereit combining the feel-good shine of someone like Jack Johnson with the grim grit of Tom Waits or Nick Cave. As for the artist I’d most readily put on the same mix tape, the Danish singer-songwriter Peter Sommer comes to mind, though of course he skews more mature. (Then again, until you get a look at May, his sound skews mature, too.)
Authenticity reigns in the arrangements, recordings, and videos. Whatever pop tropes there appear—a TikTok reference here, a synth riff there—seem to be in on the joke. Horns, ukuleles, and harmonicas provide a timeless, folk-inflected texture. To my inexpert ear, nothing here seems “produced.” Even the videos overwhelmingly document musicians performing music in circumstances that appear caught on camera, nothing more. They tend to use phones that don’t support apps, an interview reveals, and this comes as no surprise.
[Lyrics]
Part heroic, part defiant, part affectionate, songs by AnnenMayKantereit contain a tarot deck’s worth of experience and emotion. And the language they deploy, whether German or English, is quick and light. Rhymes you don’t expect, rhythms that step sideways, directness that breaks your heart. Yes, I am lucky to understand the subversive layers of May’s smooth songwriting in his native language. It’s a fact that Deutsch ist meine Lieblingssprache, die mit dem wahrsten Klang und dem besten Mundgefühl. But there’s lots to love and much to be gained in the English material alone, including the many covers, plus there’s that one song in Italian (which to me reveals how the Romance languages sound best to my ear when Germans do the talking).
Even as the words refer to boyish things—Friday nights, evenings in, new apartments, former flames—they reveal old-soul insight and a remarkable talent for crafting a story. Whether it’s universal empathy they invite, or just shared nostalgia with like-spirited listeners, that I can’t assess. Where the message gets most serious and personal is in connection to the songwriter’s parental relationships—the close but once rocky paternal one and the one that never existed with the mom who wasn’t there. (As a single mother to precisely one son, now ten, I tend to lean in hard and listen very carefully to May sing songs about that.)
Often, the lyrics are surprising, even shocking, either because of how much they reveal about their author, or because they defy your expectations of where they’re headed. So we have the wonderful angsty, bluesy Bitte Bleib, which seems to mean please stay, until it hits you that the words are a card trick you want to see over and over again. Bitte bleib, bitte bleib, bitte bleib, bitte bleib nicht wie du bist, the song goes, and the way you’d get that same message across in English is this: Please don’t go, please don’t go, please don’t go, please don’t go being how you are. Or consider some weightless verses on what’s considered their prettiest song of all, Barfuß am Klavier. Und du und ich / wir waren wunderlich—and you and me / we were lovely. Und du und ich / wir waren mal wir —and you and me / once were a we. Und du und ich / das war zu wenig—and you and me / it was too brief. Talents are not distributed fairly. May is as singular a songwriter as he is a vocalist.
[Outro]
This review? It’s a love song, I admit it. Some secrets just need to get out.
More importantly, with exactly one exception, my friends and acquaintances—in Warsaw and around the world—haven’t heard of this wonderful band. For months I’ve been having conversations about why they’re worth a listen. It’s my persistence that has made this post inevitable.
And if the algorithms that led me down this beautiful rabbit hole in the first place wind up leading someone down mine, who knows what interesting songs I might end up writing myself based on that?
Vielleicht, vielleicht. A girl keeps an open mind.
* I admit, I don’t know whether Henning May is a baritone or not. He might be a tenor with the ability to descend all the way to the bottom of the ocean. My expertise in voice training and music theory is laughably inadequate for me to speak with any authority here. However, I do know a thing or two about fact checking, and apparently my betters aren’t sure either. Until he sings us some scales, they say, it’s anybody’s guess.