Brutalismus 3000, the Berlin electronic duo comprised of producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, call their music “nu-gabber post-techno punk.” They deride Berlin’s techno scene as painfully serious and “unstylish,” cringing at ravers self-styled as revolutionaries. They shoot music videos with happy crews of children smashing and spray-painting TVs. And if they had to write a manifesto, they’d title it “Fuck Shit Up” (or “We’ll Kill a CEO”).
This devil-may-care attitude befits the duo’s loud, aggro, in-your-face music: scrap-metal synths and air-raid sirens, jackhammering hardstyle kicks, and banshee shrieks that sound like they’re being shredded through chopper blades. Brutalismus 3000’s second album, Harmony, which features Boys Noize and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady as co-producers, is the duo’s most genre-agnostic work—an anarchic riot of gabber, hardstyle, hyperpop, dubstep, electroclash, nu-metal, and punk—but also their poppiest: You could almost get away with putting the ominous trap-infused rager “Garland” on aux with the bros, and “A Milli” interpolates Lil Wayne’s original.
Zeitner claims he began producing music as a joke—making GarageBand minimal techno just to prove to his friends that it was stupid—and this strain of irreverence remains in the form of ridiculous one-liners like “We got Lenny Cohen vibes all up in this bitch.” Two versions of hardcore banger “Testo Skin” offer a peek backstage, as if you’ve been afforded the chance to glimpse diverging rough cuts; the Xanned-out second take provides an almost levitation-inducing coda to the first. Boys Noize-assisted “I Bring My Gun to the Function” loops in the giddy deliriousness of big-tent EDM, all euphoric cannons and fireworks of synths.
In interviews, Zeitner has quipped that his ADHD is the source behind Brutalismus 3000’s brain-scratching overstimulation. It’s an unserious statement, but you can hear the logic behind it. Harmony’s tracks are dense, hyperactive nuggets, pinballing between split-second sounds and textures: the plinky piano that collapses under a bass growl at the beginning of “I Bring My Gun to the Function”; the choir of demon children in “Testo Skin Part 1”; the crunchy chiptune on “Mother Bug” that sounds like a video game crawling out of your TV.
Yet Harmony isn’t pandemonium for pandemonium’s sake, and the album’s simplest tracks underscore the strength of Brutalismus 3000’s melodic foundation. “Friends at the Pigshed,” the closest they come to standard techno, is propelled by a pounding four-on-the-floor beat and Underworld’s revelations: “Let it rain, let it rain again the pain.” Like the best dance music, it revels in melancholy and wistfulness, the optimism that there will always be another chance to begin again. When Daldas’ radiant voice pours in, singing in Slovak, she sounds like salvation.
Unlike 2023 debut ULTRAKUNST, which featured a heady blend of German and Slovak, Harmony’s songs are primarily in English and stalk an American underbelly of junkyards and B-movie Los Angeles strip-mall murder fantasies. “Hannah Montana/Miss Americana/Selling fenty like Rihanna/Laced colombiana,” Daldas howls on “Garland,” and on “Testo Skin Part 2,” she contemplates the distinction between a “trenchcoat son, all-American daughter.” Actress Anya Taylor-Joy delivers rainy, urbane, Travis Bickle-ian nihilism on “Morning Is for the Happy,” reciting a poem written by Zeitner: “I got skincare on my face like I care… I fix myself and say, well, never mind.” It’s an unexpected pull, a guest feature with the feel of a half-remembered encounter on a night out.
It can be difficult, at moments, to take Harmony’s wasteland cinema seriously, especially when lines like “I cut your head when we pass with the motorcycle ninja/Neighborhood swastika enthusiast killas” and “The age of mass consumption/I bring my gun to the function” read like edgelord graffiti. Still, herein lies Brutalismus 3000’s charm: Just as you’re ready to throw your hands up on the whole affair, they blast you with a leaf blower of cyclonic electronica, sandpapering away your inhibitions. There’s no nu-gabber-whatsit revolution waiting at the end, just the purifying, pulverizing bliss of going so hard you may never have to stop.
