They didn't talk about cruising on a sunny afternoon, nor about the good times they'd have in the evening and at night. They could hardly be helped with a succinct “Take It Easy” because the monotonous sound of the wheels, the motors, the machines had brought them almost too close to madness. At the same time, the precision of the machines, their constant pounding, buzzing, and rattling had something reliable and at the same time forward-thinking. It was a rhythm of its own, a motor-driven, driving groove, made possible by technical achievements, which was to shape not only everyday work, but all of life. To have introduced this sound of factories and traffic routes, of machines and computers into pop music will not least be German bands like Kraftwerk and NEU! attributed towhose influence on subsequent generations is still immense.

Christian Riethmüller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The Frankfurt band Newmen also listened carefully to the old masters, but without wanting to reproduce their sounds.

The group, which was founded in 2012 as a trio and later grown into a quintet, has always combined several styles in their music, which they sometimes call Krautpop.

Sometimes the indie guitar rock that they played in previous bands such as Morning Boy and Verlen still sounds faint, certainly a bit of Krautrock, if that means mainly role models who used distinctively repetitive patterns, also a little (Munich) disco and last but not least the electro pop of the early eighties, which was shaped by analog synthesizers, and all of this was conceived and played by five musicians who grew up with techno.

Recordings in the Rhön

These influences can also be heard on "Futur II", the third Newmen album now released on Ferryhouse Productions. This sound that reflects cities and human gatherings was not created in an industrial area, but in rural seclusion. A holiday home in the Rhön has been a retreat for Joel Ameloot, Martin Heimann, Timm Kroner, Simon Rauland and Jörg Schmidt for several years. In the past, the house was mainly used as a retreat in order to be able to play music and tinker around undisturbed for several days, but the band, whose members live in Frankfurt and Berlin, have also set up a studio there over the past two years in order to be able to record.

The thought of legendary studios like Rockfield Studios in Wales and above all of Krautrock pioneer Conny Plank and his studio in Wolperath, which owe their own magic also to their somewhat remote location, is not far away and the band likes to admit it.

"We have the feeling that we are sometimes tired of the city," says keyboardist and guitarist Timm Kroner: "Your promises are no longer fulfilled, as we have to look at the future promises with skepticism." They wanted to set this skepticism to music Kroner and guitarist and keyboardist Jörg Schmidt of the first thoughts on the alignment of the new album, which was largely recorded before the outbreak of the corona pandemic in March 2020.

"Retro future so to speak"

“We wanted to sound like it was from the perspective of the future assumptions that bands postulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The title Futur II alludes to this. Retro future, so to speak, played with instruments of the time ", Newmen describe their musical idea, which in pieces such as" No Tricks With The Ocean "," Caravan "or" Rational Landscapes "nevertheless seems extremely topical Climate change and the resulting compulsion to migrate as well as the current pandemic situation are understood.

The band didn't want to bathe in melancholy with their new songs and instrumentals, which is also underlined by a groovy piece like “Seven Suns”, on which the musician Ketty van Doln takes part as a singer. She is not the only guest on the nine-track album, which will not only be released in digital form, but also on vinyl in the next few days, with the gimmick, by the way, that the record will run backwards and thus from the inside out.

For Newmen, a very special guest establishes a connection to Kraftwerk and thus to an important influence for the band. Wolfgang Flür, a member of Kraftwerk from 1973 to 1986, took over the vocals and also contributed the lyrics to the piece "Futur I". “I knew that Wolfgang Flür comes from Frankfurt and grew up in a house not far from the Liebieghaus,” says Jörg Schmidt in the museum garden after a concert by his band: “He has a Facebook page, and I used it to contact him asked him if he might be involved in a piece that I sent along right away. I didn't really dare to hope for a reaction, but shortly afterwards I received an answer and then the text that he recorded for us in Düsseldorf, where he lives. "

Above all, the band sees its own near future in the studio again. She prefers to tinker with things, to play with motifs, from which a piece of music is created, to an extensive tour plan. And although the well-rehearsed band knows how to create an extremely driving groove on stage, there are no concerts scheduled for the near future.