KADAVAR

Support: Scott Hepple & The Sun Band

What’s actually missing before the apocalypse? Fire from the sky? Locusts? Oceans of blood? Otherwise, everything’s already here. And of course, this isn’t a recent development: As far back as 2017, Kadavar were already blasting their way through their very own doomsday scenario with “Rough Times.” Eight years later, they’ve come to realize: It’s all just gotten much, much worse. Once again, Berlin’s rock royalty is responding with music—and it sounds significantly rawer, louder, more compact, and darker than before: “K.A.D.A.V.A.R.” is like a second debut album, a new landmark work that marries the obsessive love of riffs from their early days with the spacey creativity of the new four-piece lineup.
Just a few months ago, Kadavar made a remarkable fresh start with the spectacular space-rock trip “I Just Want To Be A Sound.” It was necessary: Lupus Lindemann, Tiger Bartelt, Jascha Kreft, and Simon Bouteloup had run out of steam. They were tired of touring all over the world. Tired of themselves, perhaps, even. But what to do with everything they’d built up? How to continue a career that had made Kadavar the biggest German vintage rock export worldwide, but now suddenly felt like a burden? Just quit? Carry on as before?
Nope.
Tear it all down.
Together with producer Max Rieger (Die Nerven), Kadavar set out in search of their identity. With “I Just Want To Be A Sound,” they’ve created an album that lays a new foundation for their sound. A foundation on which they can build anew. And that finally breaks the deadlock: Just a few months after this reset, Kadavar return to the source of their raw fuzz power. And they sound more liberated, more unbridled than they have in years.
“K.A.D.A.V.A.R.” is an album like the old days—but seen through the lens of their latest work. “This album was basically already laid out in the previous one,” says Tiger Bartelt. “It’s like a negative of it.” What tended to meander on the last record now grooves again. Where the focus was more on atmospheric textures, the riff now reigns supreme once more. “We’re consciously going back to our roots,” adds Lupus Lindemann. “We wanted fat riffs again; we were in the mood for booming hard rock.”