Oskar Haag - präsentiert von Rausgegangen - AUSVERKAUFT

Who actually is this Oskar Haag who is turning the whole of Austria's head? In the summer of two years ago, the then 15-year-old made his first appearance as the last artist at the Popfest of the usually tasteful radio station FM4, and he enchanted the Karlskirche in Vienna with his songs. Since then, he has been declared the Viennese wonder boy, the androgynous shining light of the domestic music scene, the poster boy of Generation Z, Austria's indie hope, the country's most important musician and the youngest Amadeus Austrian Music Award winner ever. In the meantime, he is even on stage as an actor in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" at the Burgtheater, singing and playing as if he had been kissed by the muse for that very reason and cursed by his chemistry teacher because he dropped out of school at 16 because of music instead of learning something sensible. Oskar Haag has released four singles so far, each of which reached the top of the Radio FM4 charts, and in March his debut record "Teenage Lullabies" was released, which is also exactly the great work everyone has been waiting for. It's almost eerie: if the young man played the blues, you'd certainly assume he'd seduced the devil at Crossroad with his angelic looks and delicacy to throw the excess talent at him with no quid pro quo or contract. But the songs Haag put on the record speak a different language. He sings, he says in the interview, only about issues that so preoccupy teenagers, only overdramatized. He plays his acoustic guitar and sings with this rough and yet fine voice, around which an unobtrusive sound world opens up, sometimes electronic, sometimes instrumental, which shapes the respective character of the pieces. Haag makes indie, inspired by his great idols, the Beatles, and perhaps also by other Brits like Oasis or the folk of Beirut. But in the end he finds his way back again: it's the fine, melancholic waltzes like "Black Dress" or "Light" that reconnect him with Vienna in three-four time. And it is, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung judged, "amazing how much love and suffering there is in the songs of this 17-year-old, how much pain and feeling there is in his fine voice." As part of his tour planned for early 2024, further shows can now be confirmed in Cologne, Heidelberg, Ulm and Hamburg.