There’s not a lot that Ingolstadt band Slut haven’t done. Across a twenty-plus-year career, the indie-rock five-piece have made nine albums, taken on the Brecht/ Weill classic The Threepenny Opera and composed a sonic novella with writer Juli Zeh – all on the way to becoming one of Germany’s favourite live bands, with a sea of fans waiting to sing back at them whenever they take to the stage at festivals and their own shows all across central Europe. But there is one thing, that until now, they hadn’t had time for – taking a break. Slut had never gone more than a couple of years without a release before, but all that changed after the release of their eight album, the icy Alienation, which was followed by eight years of radio silence. Now however, that period is finally over – Slut are back with a brand new album, Talks Of Paradise, and seeing as it seems that Paradise, like Heaven, can wait, we meet singer Christian Neuburger to find out example where they’ve been.
The story of Talks Of Paradise begins with the end of the story of Alienation. A year of touring the record, on top of twenty years of cumulative touring and working, had left the band burnt out. “[Taking a break] wasn’t pre-planned”, says Neuburger, “it just happened. In 2014 we had been a band for almost 20 years, and at that point in time, we had probably reached a moment where everyone wanted to have some time off, and be free of making music, going on tour, recording. These repeating cycles. We played our last show of the tour, at an open-air festival by a lake, and it was beautiful. So as soon as we got back on the tour bus, we started talking about how we might continue, and how things could evolve after this final show. And everybody was fine with saying goodbye for a while. We didn’t make any further appointments or plans, we just decided to take a break as a band. I think ‘Alienation’, as an album, was a collection of fragments. And we felt like fragments after touring that album all over the stages of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It wasn’t holistic anymore. So we went to look for a reset button, and it took us three years to finally find it”.
The band all took the time to get some space, and find a way to recharge their creative batteries. Neuburger found relaxation in taking the time to enjoy other people’s art, without the pressure of having to produce his own. But the plan was always to return to Slut eventually, and in 2017, Neuburger and guitarist Rainer Schaller started to feel the itch again. Schaller made a call, and they agreed it was time to start working again. So they booked a flight to Athens. “A couple of tickets to Athens landed in my email inbox, just for the two of us”, says Neuburger. “Rainer has some connections in Athens, and he found an apartment. It turns out he had really prepared for this. He had planned out exactly many instruments we would be able to take with us on the plane and everything. So that’s where the idea for ‘Talks Of Paradise’ was born. So far from our comfort zone, and away from everything, and without guitars and amps, without loudness.
We just had just a laptop, a keyboard, a mic and a mic stand, in this empty apartment in Athens. And there was a strange atmosphere in that apartment, which made songs like ‘Tell Your Friends’ happen, this gloomy kind of mood, with unknown noises everywhere. Unknown noises in an unknown city. So with very limited equipment, we just started to work, without any plans”.
The need for a fresh perspective
The limited equipment part of the plan turned out to be crucial. With just a few toys to play with, it forced them to operate outside of their comfort zone, to, as Neuburger puts it, ‘de-automize’ their songwriting process. Doing that opened up new creative pathways. “I think it was about getting rid of routine, and not falling back into old patterns, and staying off the beaten track – that was the hardest thing to do I think. But without instruments, there is less danger of that happening. With a guitar, it’s very easy, it’s loud, it fills the room with tone and sound, and that wasn’t what we wanted. It took a kind of discipline. We tried to work beyond what we had made before. We tried a form of simulation – to simulate the instruments we didn’t have, by using synthesisers and programming. So you could quickly set up a band playing a song, and that’s what we did in Athens. It takes a few minutes, and you have a form of a song, without anyone playing any instruments. It’s really fascinating. That’s why we needed a laptop and a synth – but they were just placeholders for the band”. The process took a lot of time at first: “Slut have always been a non-verbal band, which is something I have always enjoyed, and still do. We are a slow band, and we play, rather than talk. So we just exaggerated this process. We were making music for 8, 10 hours a day, with just some short breaks where we walked through Athens and got some food. I remember we didn’t talk for days, we just recorded and recorded. And after all these years, it was magic. The results came so quickly, not final versions at that point. But ‘Tell Your Friends’, ‘Good For All’, ‘For The Soul There Is No Hospital’, we did three songs in three days. So we took these songs back home, and remade them a lot before they took their final form, but they all started there in Athens”.
Later on, there were more recording sessions in Rome and Ingolstadt, this time with the rest of the band (bassist Gerd Rosenacker, drummer Matthias Neuburger and keys player René Arbeithuber), and over a number of years, the album started to come together. And there are a lot of moments on Talks Of Paradise that speak to the time and care that went into making it. The song Tell Your Friends, placed right at the record’s heart, is a soft, slow-burning song that gracefully builds and blooms before smashing into a crashing, epic finale. It’s a product of a lot of time spent building these songs, and carefully layering them until they reached their full potential. “Tell Your Friends really was a start point for [the album]” says Neuburger, “it was the first song that made it to a place where it really was able to surprise us. Tell Your Friends became the standard – from that point on, every song had to match its level. [Songwriting] is dramaturgy. It’s how a song evolves, it starts softly, and then culminates in a grand finale like Tell Your Friends. That’s what we did first with Tell Your Friends, followed by Good For All, which we finished three months before the end of the record, and was kind of an overture for the record. Layering songs has always been something this band has used. But superimposing too many layers also was a routine we had – we used to do this with guitars, just adding layers until we had a wall of sound, and we felt at home in that. So this time, the hardest thing to do was to layer, but also to be able to pull layers away. So that only a skeleton was left. We layered, but we also took away maybe 50/60% of the tracks we recorded in the end, in order to keep the essence of the song. That was hard for us, and draining”.
The album isn’t just about slow, graceful, epic songs like Tell Your Friends however. There’s plenty of zip on Talks Of Paradise, in the shape of songs like the neon, streetwise dance-rock song Penny Changes Dresses and strutting rocker Vandals. In fact, Slut sound like they’re playing with more ideas than ever before. There’s a lot of stylistic variation going on in the structures of the songs, which the band then wrap up in the Slut sound.
“We had a lot of ideas, at different points at different times. Due to the fact that the record was written across four years, I think you can hear songs from different periods. We just had a great collection – which is quite a luxury for us. We had 20 songs, which we have never had before. Older Slut records were just the songs on the album. Now we had a choice, and so we had to choose. We wanted to pick songs from all those different periods, and put them on the album.”
He continues to elaborate on this: “It is a homogenous album I think compared to Alienation. But within this wholeness, you can find a lot of difference. A lot of different ways of songwriting, different styles, different songs. Vandals, for example, it’s clear to any listener, that this is a rock song. And when we started it was even louder! But all these songs had to make it over a certain border, and then they became part of the family”. Songs like the more abstract Fala came through freedom to experiment: “’Fala’, ‘Yes No Why Later’, and ‘Black Sleep’, they all appeared in December 2020, all at around the same time. I think we were in need of more experimental song structures, or even interludes, not songs. At this point in time, we were listening to music that was very different from anything we had written before. Especially Fala, which is the Polish for wave, this was the result of listening to a lot of polyrhythmic afrobeat, Ethiopian jazz. We tried to superimpose different times from different drums, and just let it roll and roll and roll, and the end of the song, the beautiful finale, it’s from a different song. So we fused them – two songs became one in the end. It also came from a fascination with krautrock, just letting it go and flow. There was no need for any structure or scheme – we wanted to leave that behind. With’ Yes No Why Later’ it was the same – once upon a time it was a pop song, but we then deprived it of drums, bass, guitars, everything. It became a fragment”.
Photo by Gerald Von Foris
No need for nostalgia
Alienation was a very heavy record, with a darkness running through it. Talks Of Paradise is less coherent in terms of its themes – its lyrics capture snapshots of different feelings and perspectives, multiple pictures from multiple moments in time. The extended break, and time off, gave Neuburger the chance to write in a way her never had before: “The concept concerning the lyrics was not to have a concept. I spoke to a journalist about a year ago, and he asked what these songs were about. I said ‘well, they’re love songs’. Some of these stories really happened, others are just fiction. But it’s half love songs and stories, and the others are just lyrics dealing with a certain situation which I was in at that moment. The lyrics from Tell Your Friends came from these strange noises in an empty apartment at night. ‘Yes No Why Later’ are excerpts from poems I had written around that time, and I just sampled them in a way. Which I had never done before. I tend to write lyrics like it’s a very important job, and that there needs to be a story that has to be told from the beginning, and there has to be a climax, a solution. But writing lyrics for ‘Talks Of Paradise’ was like a walk through different periods of time, through different issues. And for me it was a pleasure. I can’t remember an album we’ve made before, where I’ve had a book full of lyrics before starting a song. That was exceptional for me. For decades, it was the other way around. ‘We have the music, so now we need lyrics. Hurry up!’ [laughs]”.
Pleasantly for fans of nice, round numbers, Talks Of Paradise arrives 25 years after the band’s first record, For Exercise and Amusement. Neuburger doesn’t pay too much heed to that anniversary, but is excited about the re-energised band’s future: “Thinking about [the anniversary] just brings feelings of joy. Because 27 years [the band’s lifespan] is a pretty long time, and all of us are still good friends, and we never stopped making music together. I think that’s a privilege. 25 is just a number, and looking back, we had a lot of different periods, we tried out almost everything that was possible for us. But making music, and releasing a record after all these years? That’s something very special. So nostalgic? No. But I’m aware of the privilege we have, and I’m look forward to what’s going to happen. One week ago, asked Rainer how he was feeling – ‘should we stop again, or just go on and keep writing new music?’. Because we have a flow now, so we need to go on. So let’s see what happens. Maybe we can talk about it after the tour, but I feel it will be the same. It’s just ten days of touring, that’s easy!”. On the evidence of the vivid, composed and vibrant Talks Of Paradise, Slut won’t be running out of energy any time soon.
Slut’s Talks Of Paradise is out now on Lookbook.
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