ENDLESS WELLNESS

In the organizer's words:

"Was für ein Glück" is not only the name of their debut album, released in January 2024, but also the only appropriate response to the announcement of Endless Wellness' Live 2025 tour. Four Austrian friends, all from different musical backgrounds, who have started to release German-language indie music with both entertaining and socially critical lyrics. Musically, Philipp (vocals, rhythm guitar), Milena (bass, vocals), Adele (lead guitar) and Hjörtur (keys) sound like Big Thief, the folky tracks of Arcade Fire or Neutral Milk Hotel. And they still sprinkle a good dose of self-irony into their simultaneously intimate and confrontational lyrics, which deal with mental health, everyday life and society.

There is a strumming Western guitar that is overdriven. An organ provides a surface, sometimes joined by a dark synthesizer. It could be called "fuzz folk" or simply classified as all-encompassing indie; they could be described as the "Big Thief, only in German", the "early Tocotronic, but later" or as "Isolation Berlin from Vienna" - but it's not quite so easy to make comparisons. The obscurely poetic, German-language lyrics are a loud confrontation with depression and always build a bridge to society, from the microcosm to the macrocosm. They are alternative love songs, for mindfulness, for confidence, for: Endless Wellness.

Philipp, Adele, Hjörtur and Milena have been friends for 13 years. They were already playing in bands together as teenagers in their former home of Salzburg. The official launch of this project was therefore only a matter of time: after a decade, the four of them, now all living in Vienna at the same time, came together as a band. Even though Endless Wellness has only existed since 2021, their musical collaboration is based on their close friendship; a foundation on which a vulnerability in the creative process can arise that is only possible with the security of deep, interpersonal connection.

This security, this togetherness, can be felt far beyond the band context - without having released a single song, Endless Wellness have already built up a close-knit fan base that immediately bought up all the tickets for their concerts at Chelsea and Rhiz am Gürtel in Vienna. No wonder: when the band is on stage, people want to get up and join in and have fun. Their songs are an attempt to redirect the feeling of collective exhaustion into a collective, loud rebellion - against a dysfunctional system that is riddled with failed climate policies and a resurgent fascism. These are songs to listen to alone or to dance to together, shaking the weight off your shoulders. It is an ambivalent tension that hovers between the urgent music and the lyrics about existential fears. In this way, Endless Wellness manage to capture our time and its ghosts and transform them into melancholic but comforting warmth. This may happen with humor, with harmonies and definitely with distortion.