Acne Kid Joe, from Nuremberg, tackles the threatened shift to the right after the European elections with verve on their new album “4 von 5”.
Middle Franconian punks Acne Kid Joe Photo: Photo: Kidnap Music
For a lean decade, Nuremberg’s Akne Kid Joe has been lifting the boots of German punk hell with their intellectual, feel-good sound. Now their fourth album “4 von 5” has been released with 14 songs that are even more musically and lyrically refined. Who thinks, the Franconian asylum tourist Markus Söder Acne Kid Joe has never heard of the fact that he is the only Nuremberg screamer known throughout Germany who has something to say in Bavaria.
The quartet around guitarist Sarah Lohr released its debut album ‘Karate Kid Joe’ in 2018. It also contains the song “markus erredezer”, about the CSU ethnocentrist who was born in Nuremberg. In it, the band contradicts a statement by the writer Jules Verne and claims that the southern city of Nuremberg is the center of the world. This is perhaps why they received the Nuremberg Culture Prize in 2022.
Anyone who had not yet fallen in love with AKJ’s humor at the time was fascinated by the mafia apheromones in 2020 with the song ‘What the AfD thinks we do’, in which masked professional anti-fascists receive their check after ‘fighting against AfD and the capital’ . from “Antifa-Reisen-GmbH”. A stupid German, right-wing extremist AfD story delicious with sausages and grilled. The message arrived: the anthem has now been streamed almost 3 million times on Spotify.
Tucho sends greetings
The new album “4 out of 5” is also political, has literary references and sounds extremely successful: in the new songs, content and form are in intimate harmony. And there will be “a round of betrayal,” which could be particularly tasty given the AfD’s dangerous nationalism, in the spirit of Kurt Tucholsky, who wrote in 1926: “These people can only be dealt with if they sense the enemy, […] whether they blame us for that […] Being traitors to the homeland and enemies of the state: all that is completely irrelevant. We didn’t ask them.”
From the opening track ‘Today in the spam folder’, which is introduced by a keyboard that would make Yann Tiersen clap his hands above his head, AKJ recalls polite phrases: ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Self titled’ is the ironic AKJ biography par excellence that focuses on the production factor of attention.
Introduced by industrial sound that underlines the capitalist nature of the music industry and shows a development towards a literary-musical work of art. Because it also works on a second level, when the music underlines the lyrics, replaced by a Sex Pistols guitar riff.
No macho biotope
Then it sounds nodding – and pogo-worthy: “May I introduce our business model / Political slogans, but original / Of course it would be best to have a woman in the band / Do you know anyone who knows a woman? ” The latter is of course a fuck finger on the patriarchal biceps of the machistic punk scene and on the song ‘Sarah (woman, also in a band)’ from 2020, in which guitarist Sarah Lohr caused a stir in the scene with the words: ‘ The stages of this world are clear to everyone / Were never macho and never only for men.
Sarah Lohr also recently campaigned in the BR talk show ‘Wahlarena’ with EU parliament member Thomas Rudner (SPD) not to extradite the Nuremberg anti-fascist Hannah to pre-fascist Hungary. However, the men* also share the precarious existence of artists, squeezed out by Spotify and Co., as the song ’50/50′, including Egotronic keyboard and ska beat, makes clear.
“Work, pay rent / Rob the savings bank / Fifty-Fifty.” The cheeky love song “Minimum Order Value” with delicate riffs and almost romantic melodies creates a longing for how an artificially created need keeps the currently troubled market alive. Flowers fly into the bushes in front of your loved one’s apartment. “…it’s hard alone with the minimum order value / With two people it wasn’t that hard.”
Great, down to earth
With AKJ, down-to-earth Ramoneskrawumms meets driving chords and catchy grow-along choruses, alternating with circus keyboard tones that make you think the clown is around the corner, but he has made it easy in the lyrics.
That’s what punk should do in 2024: have fun and take the world apart as clearly as possible, without putting a sheet of music in front of your mouth. AKJ’s lyrics are striking analyzes of our broken world, engraved with punk precision like the tattoos of keyboardist Hackepeter and singer Matti, with a pleasant touch of Provo, fine irony and rough phrases.
Transparency note: the author was tattooed by Acne Kid Joe keyboardist Hackepeter. He paid the normal price for five hours of pain.