Lyschko are three people from a medium-sized city in North Rhine-Westphalia whose frustration is released in concentrated musical force. Brutal pop music torn from the dark heart of youthful fear in the face of the state of the world; but at the same time music that recognizes the circumstances as made and changeable and seeks to overcome them in a utopian way; music, finally, that draws great dreams from its own insecurity.
Not only born pessimists can rejoice: on April 19, SCHRAMM will release his charmingly pointedly titled second EP "How to fail at love". Two release concerts and an appearance at c/o pop in Cologne are scheduled shortly afterwards. Arne Schramm first attracted attention in 2022 when he released the no less stylishly titled debut EP "I made this for myself (I didn't make it for you)".
On it, he combined The Strokes guitars and UK indie rock influences with his very own infectious humor and suddenly found himself receiving plenty of praise for his first original songs. The photographer, filmmaker and creative jack-of-all-trades from Wuppertal, who now lives in Berlin, had already considered giving up making music for a career with his own film production company. Fortunately, things turned out differently.
On the new EP "How to fail at love" you can sense a clear further development of the young musician. SCHRAMM switches effortlessly between German and English and demands "composure" right at the beginning, which is difficult to maintain in the face of the rousing songs. The body wants to move rhythmically, right from the start, when darkwave meets autotune and gabber (!) in the opener "Fail at Love". The straightforward, energetic post-punk anthem "summerrain" features guitars reminiscent of The Cure, while "sunburned/goodbye" turns out to be a shoegaze ballad, in whose truly great music video SCHRAMM reveals his despair in an open-plan office.
The following "graublau" once again illustrates the heaviness of the content of the new songs, as this is SCHRAMM's drinking song. However, the song is by no means to be understood in the sense of Father's Day handcart escalation. It's about dreary everyday alcoholism and habitual drinking, about the monotony associated with it. SCHRAMM explains: "I wrote graublau in a pretty bad phase in the winter of the year before last. I left the demo and the lyrics lying around for a long time and, in classic fashion, only realized afterwards what was already subconsciously bothering me at the time. It took me quite a long time to understand that I didn't have a healthy relationship with alcohol. I grew up thinking that regular alcohol consumption was normal and at some point I had to realize that this alone put me in a group that was more at risk of addiction."
A theme that can also be found in the single "Vertraut", when the protagonist sings of entertaining infatuation in the strobe light over echoing guitars: "I'm not necessarily a big partygoer - but I've often stayed at some rather exhausting, loud parties in my life just because the one person was there. This feeling is what Vertraut is about. Being completely flashed by a person one evening, wanting to sit somewhere together and talk all night, but then letting yourself be dragged to the next party for that person.