Lena&Linus

In the artist's words:

Springy beats, melancholy memories of past loves and the excitingly vague feeling of a shared future unite LENA&LINUS on their second EP, which will be released in September via Tautorat Tonträger. The musical references are American, somewhere between Angus & Julia Stone and Clairo. Lyrically, the Würzburg duo manages to write emotional German lyrics that come across as light and easy and never sound cheesy.

LENA&LINUS got to know each other in the Würzburg music scene, where they were both on the road: LINUS with self-produced English-language indie pop, LENA with electronic German pop. When you're young and there's not so much going on where you are, it's a logical thought: let's do something together. So the two of them start playing concerts together. City festivals, local festivals, whatever you play.

"I knew early on that I wanted to be a musician, maybe a songwriter.I started writing songswhen I wastwelve and had planned to make music my profession ever since," says LENA. LINUS is self-taught: "I don't come from a musical family and had lessons for a while as a teenager because I wanted to play AC/DC on the keyboard." So it was "Thunderstruck" until a buddy convinced him to try out the guitar during a skiing vacation. Then the first songs were written, all in English.

It's a leap from joint sessions in the Würzburg rehearsal room to the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin: Tim Tautorat - known for his production work for indie greats such as Annenmaykantereit, Jeremias and Betterov - helps out. He recorded the duo's first EP there in 2022, in a reduced, acoustic setup. Just guitars and voices. "Fühlstdu dich allein?" deals with sadness, loneliness and lost love with melancholy guitar sounds: broken riffs for broken hearts.

With their second EP, which will be released in September, LENA&LINUS are taking the next logical step: healing instead of sadness. Catchy melodies carry more optimistic lyrics and harmonize with the laid-back attitude usually associated with Phoebe Bridgers or Alex G. LENA&LINUS share a directness of language with them. Together they proceed intuitively, developing precise descriptions of feelings from a flood of notes: Working with finely drawn images and simple, clear language. Not many German acts do this. Perhaps more so in rap, where various artists are currently on the move who compose in a very similar way and whom the two Würzburgers appreciate.

"Rosarot" was recently released as the first harbinger of the new EP and presents another musical facet in the spectrum: a single guitar track that adorns the beginning opens up to an electronic production in the course of the song, with which the duo sets off to new shores of sound. The result is a melancholy break-up song that describes the first lonely birthday after the break-up and the rose-tinted glasses when looking back at their shared past.

During the conversation, the second tractor drives past in the distance, this time with LENA standing in the garden. And it's safe to say that at some point, the inhabitants of a small Bavarian community will talk about the first time they went to a concert by a band that the whole country now knows.

And rightly so: after all, LENA&LINUS from Würzburg are probably writing the most exciting German-language pop music right now.