‘Only bad vibes’: Brutalismus 3000 on making their ‘toxic’ new album

Brutalismus 3000’s latest album, Harmony, is the Berlin-based duo’s most ambitious work to date, by their own reckoning. “It’s the first one where we found ourselves truly as a band,” says Theo Zeitner. “The language we’re speaking now is way closer to what we want to be. And the amount of work that went into this record was maybe a hundred times the amount we put into the last one.” The “last one” being 2023’s Ultrakunst, which arrived out of pandemic lockdowns in a storm of kick drums, blown-out vocals, snarling synths, and sweaty clubnights.

Ultrakunst was technically the electronic act’s debut album, produced five years after the pair met on Tinder and started making music together. But now, Harmony feels like another debut, Zeitner adds – at least, the first showcase of a different way of working, with collaborators including 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and Boys Noize on production, plus vocals from Underworld and Anya Taylor-Joy. And, as with any “debut”, the anxiety and excitement is running high. “We waited almost two years to release this,” says Zeitner. “Now it’s like, what the fuck? Give us some more time. We need to process some stuff.”

The anxiety has been tempered, at least, by live listening parties across the world these last few months. “The first listening party was in Japan,” says Victoria Vassiliki Daldas. “And people went completely nuts. It took all our fears away.” The Tokyo show was followed by appearances in China – “we were really surprised that we have so many fans there, and it was actually very emotional for me, because it’s crazy to think that people listen to our music so far away from home,” says Daldas – and New York, where the sweltering listening party was shut down by the NYPD. 

“New York is one of our favorite cities to play, because they always go pretty hard,” adds Zeitner. “But everything was against us that night. The fucking heat, no AC, then cops came, and then it started to rain immediately as everyone got outside. I think God didn’t want us to play in New York that night.” That didn’t stop them closing out the set with their 2020 track “No Sex With Cops”.

On Harmony, the pair is as willing as ever to confront dark themes and provoke political discourse. Both are woven in among moments of playfulness and poetry, lifted from their notebooks and/or Notes app, typed in transit or written together during “wild, stream-of-consciousness” sessions around the kitchen table. The title, says Zeitner, was a kind of ironic starting point: “We wanted to strive against toxic positivity. We wanted to make this really toxic record called Harmony, which is only bad vibes and just really fucks with you. Just to make the world a little bit worse.” But, as the world outside the album did get worse, something strange happened to the record itself. “We started out really aggressive and everything,” he explains. “But in the making of the record it became so much lighter.” 

This shift was partly a result of the collaborations: B3K linked up with Underworld for the hypnotic track “Friends at the Pigshed”, titled in homage to the legendary musician’s converted studio space, while Anya Taylor-Joy narrated “Morning is For the Happy” after a weekend with the duo at Berghain. “There was a lot of hope and fun and togetherness in there,” they add. “There is a harmony in the record that we didn’t plan on. Now, after two years, it’s got a totally different meaning for us.”

The duo themselves have been more involved in every part of the album process, as well, from creating the cover art with about 40 litres of pig’s blood (“We didn’t expect it to be such a mess”) to shaping a trilogy of videos. The first video, for the riotous opener “I Bring My Gun to the Function”, features scenes from a rehearsal for the second video, “Gore Louvre”, which depicts an anarchic home invasion captured by night vision cameras. The aesthetic conjures up a whole range of associations, from horror films, to drone strikes, to viral clips from Ring doorbells.

“We were really inspired by pictures of the raid on Gaddafi’s mansion,” says Zeitner, “but then we made it way softer in tone, and more playful.” The final video in the trilogy, “Testo Skin Part 1”, revisits the same space in the form of a traditional house viewing (albeit with eerie, disassociated bodies and a high-powered rifle in the mix).

Much of Harmony was produced in North America, and the whole record is “very North American” in its themes, Zeitner says (in fact, throughout this interview, the duo’s background is a large painting of Wesley Snipes in Blade, with a shotgun over his shoulder and a rippling US flag in the foreground). These themes naturally include the spectre of a rising technoauthoritarian class, and all the anger and violence that comes along with it. “It’s impossible not to, when you make art,” Daldas says. “It’s in our minds all day, how fucking horrible everything is right now, so even if you talk about yourself, if you make a love song, it’s kind of in there.”

After all, the glimmer of hope that runs through an album like Harmony shouldn’t be mistaken for actual optimism about where the world is heading. “For most people, the last two years have managed to get even shittier than before,” Zeitner concludes. “The worldview has gotten even darker over time.” And, toxic or not, Brutalismus 3000 have no problem telling it as it is.

Harmony is out now.