Tower, Antenna create music that is bittersweet, gritty and alluringly catchy.
Hamburg residents Ulrich Witt, Florian Schmuck and Stephan Richter reformed the trio in 2015, with post-punk- style vocals, melancholic guitar melodies and dark electronic instrumentation, paving the way for their first collection of songs.
The founding members began crafting their style – post punk meets desert rock – in the shape of Tower, Antenna in 2010. Coming from very diverse musical backgrounds, the band grew increasingly inspired by the sounds of contemporary R&B and moved further away from the classic rock music arrangements, creating a unique and accessible mix of organic and synthetic atmospheres combined with catchy R&B inspired grooves.
Today their songs yield the same proofs as those classic melancholic pop songs you can’t help but dance to – be it 'Blue Monday', 'Personal Jesus' or 'Karma Police': That the gloom of it shimmers like platinum if you tweak the light in a certain way. That deep down in the drama lives an elastic groove. And that darkness often enough tastes like gin & tonic if only you dare to lick it.
After the EP 'Supercollider' that Tower, Antenna presented in Oktober 2016 as their first black light-laden business card, now comes the band’s full debut album. The opener ‘A Thousand Fears Later’ is the first single release of the same-titled longplayer.
The history: Their first concert took place in a bar on the notorious Reeperbahn in 2012. Back then Tower, Antenna still had a drummer – making stoner rock with heavy riffs, covered in desert sand, beefy. The decisive turn in their musical evolution happened three years later, in the late fall of 2015. Their stand-in drummer cancelled in the lead-up to a gig, and the resulting emergency procedure turned out to be a momentous piece of good fortune. The group were forced to fashion up a programmed live set, practically overnight, consisting of drum machine and bass synths to go with the vocals and guitar. All of a sudden the music of Tower, Antenna sounded a lot more focused, denser, fiercer. Less like a fuzz monster and more like a character study. Almost as if something had gotten cut loose, something hidden within the songs had finally become audible. The black- and-white-film had suddenly become chromatic, with very dark and pulsating tones of crimson red and underwater black.
In 2017, the sound of Tower, Antenna is an amalgam of deep breathing sub-bass pop, with the heart rate of
electronic post punk, and melodies that are just as somber as they are catchy. “A Thousand Fears Later”
calibrates the emotional state within it’s first minutes and descends below the loud and colorful surface of today
into it’s gloom. Menacing yet gracious, the melodic groove rasps itself into the listener’s mood and stays in your
ear for quite some time. The severity of the band’s expression oscillates between inert rigidity and synthpop-
despair with its 808 beats. In the second half of the album you stumble over 'Spiralling', a cover version of a hit
song by the English softpop band Keane. that sounds like Tower, Antenna’s vision of a sleeping giant’s deep
dream. Through it all, energetic guitar themes and hypnotic funk puts you under it's spell, until everything aligns
with the analogue-instrumental ‘New Feelings’ and leaves the listener in a gloaming dusk.
One way or another you are going to hear from this band – so you might as well do it now. While their sound is pensive and sorrowful, it is also made to be danced to for days and nights on end.