Considering the reviews of their two previous albums, the band seems elusive to the media. Each review has been pigeonholed into a different genre. Comparisons have been drawn, from King Crimson to The Doors, from Frank Zappa to David Bowie, from Gentle Giant to Sun Ra – and it’s not getting any easier to categorize the Leipzig band’s sound on their third album.

The album title, among other things, indicates that there have been major personnel changes. Georg Spieß (guitar) and Frank Mühlenberg (vocals) are the stalwarts in the band’s history. New additions are Lennart Jahn (Hammond/keyboards), Jacob Müller (bass), and Dominique “Gaga” Ehlert (drums).

And “Re:Creation” requires time in two senses of the word; after all, the album was recorded in January 2022 at the Echolux Studio in Leipzig. Over the past three years, the band has refined and polished the album, and the content also shows a certain sense of a gloomy world situation. The dark, the absurd, the beautiful, but also the hopeful permeate the album, as does the band’s entire work.

The contradictions of the man-made world are the driving forces behind their songs, and these can be found in observations both small and large, in fragmented thought fragments, as well as in anecdotes from history or from the kitchen table. This approach could be called a diagnosis of the times through fragmentary reflection. After all, in 2015 the band named itself after one of their own songs, which deals with the fusion of groaning humanity with a dusty hard drive, from where the algorithm now controls sensation and consciousness. Ten years later, one feels astonishingly close to this dystopia. And so it almost doesn’t matter whether they sing about the emptiness that craves abundance, a female elephant sentenced to death by hanging, or the difficult relationship between the subject and the state in times when threat and protection are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Because whether dancing on the edge is an accusation or is itself accused: WELCOME INSIDE THE BRAIN clearly sounds like WELCOME INSIDE THE BRAIN, and with this album they provide the soundtrack to the poly crisis.