Back in the early 1980s, Anja Huwe was the lead singer (although not originally by choice) of German post-punk pioneers Xmal Deutschland. The band tore across the world, inspiring many and becoming somewhat secret legends before they split up for other ventures. Huwe became a fashion model and visual artist, but music was still in her blood. Now, almost out of nowhere, she’s returned with a new album, Codes, and is exploring what it’s like to live in extremes – be it extreme environments, relationships, or beliefs.
Beginning with gothic, lonely guitar chords by fellow Xmal Deutschland bandmate Manuela Rickers, “Skuggornas” has Huwe confessing, “I don’t regret anything I’ve done. I have lived, and I have sinned.” Most of us can’t admit half of that, and here Huwe is doing it with elegance. “Rabenschwarz” (“Black Raven”) hits with powerful industrial crunch and themes of rebirth.
“I changed myself into myself,” Huwe sings on “Pariah.” The drum beats on it start at a slow boil and are soon cooking a luxurious brew. “Exit” moves around you like a cat that might be an android in disguise. Rickers’ guitar sounds like its being played in an abandoned factory a half-mile away (to produce a cool effect, mind you). “O Wald” (“Oh Forest”) could easily fit into a science fiction movie or the soundtrack to season five of Stranger Things with its computer-generated 16-bit-like synth beats.
“Zwischenwelt” (“Intermediate World”) would also fit on that soundtrack with both its theme of being between worlds and also its misty synths and Huwe’s beautiful vocals on it. “Sleep with One Eye Open” reminds me a bit of early Peter Gabriel tracks with its neat bass line, slightly weird percussion, and Huwe’s delivery. “How shall we face the cold?” Huwe asks on the somewhat stark, yet aggressive “Living in the Forest” – inspired by diary entries of a boy, Moshe Shnitzki, who left his home in 1942 to live in the White Russian Forest. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” she sings on the following, closing track, “Hideaway,” leaving us with hope that more music from Huwe (and Xmal Deutschland?) will come.
Today Sacred Bones are excited to announce two parallel releases – a reissue of Xmal Deutschland’s ‘Early Singles’ (including two bonus tracks), as well as the debut solo album from Xmal Deutschland’s inimitable frontwoman Anja Huwe, ‘Codes’. Both records are set for release side-by-side on March 8th, 2024.
Xmal Deutschland are now marked as forerunners of the post-punk movement and ‘Early Singles (1981-1982)’ is a map of their foundational movements, just seconds before takeoff. The band’s pursuit of something greater is palpable with this release, a reflection of a time that introduced accessibility to new means of making music following the onset of punk. This reissue includes two bonus tracks; “Kaelbermarsch” (originally from the compilation “Lieber Zuviel Als Zuwenig”) and a gritty live version of “Allein” (originally from the compilation “Nosferatu Festival”), which is shared online today along with a video montage of footage from this era of the band’s career.
Alongside the reissue comes the debut solo release from Xmal Deutschland’s incomparable frontwoman, Anja Huwe. Invited by her long-time friend Mona Mur, Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music and decided to join Mur in her studio in Berlin. Together, they worked for a year and a half, composing, performing and producing the tracks from scratch which eventually became the album ‘Codes’.
Integral to the overall sound experience was the input of Manuela Rickers who added her famed signature guitar style. The collaboration was relentless: “Mona and I have a similar artistic background since the 1980s. We hung out together, and we sport a similar attitude towards life and art. We don’t have to explain ourselves to one another,” says Huwe. Mur adds: “Anja’s voice is like a spear, her appearance a torch in the darkness.”
Initially inspired by the diary entries of Moshe Shnitzki, who, at the age of 17, left his home in 1942 to live in the cavernous White Russian forests as a partisan, ‘Codes’ is about the human experience and what extremes can do to an individual. “The result is a poetic, musical cosmos that encompasses the following themes: forest, fear, pain, loss, violence, and loneliness but also beauty, longing, hope and the will to survive,” Huwe explains.
Along with the announcement today, she shares “Rabenschwarz”, a frenzied song, which, with Rickers’ hypnotic apocalyptic guitars, Mur’s agitated and distinctive electronic sounds and beats, forged together with Huwe’s unmistakably energetic and expressive vocals, hits you in the face. A captivating combination.
More about Xmal Deutschland and Anja Huwe: “Gothics”—a time before the word goth had even taken shape—believed in the do-it-yourself punk ethos that anyone could pick up an instrument. This, alongside the bric-a-brac fashion of Adam Ant and the long-winded atmospheric malaise of Bauhaus’ 1979 single, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” grey clouds were starting to form. And in the unlikely city of Hamburg, a brazen and haunting gang of five women formed Xmal Deutschland.
As any true punk would, Xmal Deutschland’s members Caro May, Rita Simon, Manuela Rickers, Fiona Sangster and Anja Huwe, started the band despite not having had any previous musical experience. When they bought studio time to record their first single, “Schwarze Welt,” Simon was originally slated to be the lead vocalist but failed to show on the day of recording. Huwe—who originally played bass—was thrust into the front-woman position, and begrudgingly agreed: “The only condition from my side [was that] I will never perform onstage… Two months later, they made me without ever telling me upfront. I had no choice.”
The “Schwarze Welt” seven-inch was released on the local punk label, ZickZack, in 1981 and introduced the band as an unsettling swarm of intensity. There’s an urgency in its repetitive dirge, a swirling mania that persists on the b-side with “Die Wolken” and “Großstadtindianer” whose crude synthesiser noises escalate in tension. Most of all, Huwe’s uniquely venomous German vocals quickly became embedded in the unbridled and burgeoning scene of glamorous gloom.
Punk’s independence from the stiff grip of tradition allowed the band to find solace in anti-establishment art and music, far from the conventions of the past. “We as girls, especially being creative in many ways, ignored facts like: be nice, be polite, take good care about your looks. Of course, we wanted to look good but in a different and unconventional way. We were enough for ourselves.” However, some tropes were harder to overcome. The association of Xmal Deutschland as a girl band (later with the addition of Wolfgang Ellerbrock who, jokingly, became the token man of the group) gained traction within the media circuit because of their looks: “We were like paradise birds,” says Huwe in retaliation to the tired misogynistic tale. The band’s keyboardist, Fiona Sangster, adds: “To be an ‘all-girl band’ happened accidentally. To us, it was not the main reason to form a band.”
With their peacocked hair and thick kohl-lined eyes, Xmal Deutschland’s music retained both a restlessness and delicacy, transcending any confines of the “Neue Deutsche Welle” movement (much like their colleagues and friends DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten) with the release of the “Incubus Succubus” single in 1982. It instantly became a post-punk classic. That same year, the band performed in London as support for the Cocteau Twins; it was the platform they needed to ricochet into the arms of the ripped fishnet masses. After Xmal Deutschland’s success with four albums on cult labels such as 4AD, Huwe abandoned music to pursue her visual art career. But leaving her legacy in the past was not so easy: “Since the split in the early 1990s, I have been haunted by the ‘Legend of Xmal Deutschland’ and never-ending requests from all over the world, all of which I always turned down,” she says.
