With a wide range of sounds - from sluggish and hymn-like to clearly pop-electronic - Niels Frevert (55) says goodbye to his rather melancholic singer-songwriter image with his new album "Pseudopoesie" and takes another giant step towards German Pop.

This is simply because the musician never wants to rest on the status quo. "I had made three acoustic records and now something else had to happen," says the man from Hamburg. "But that also has something to do with the new songs, because they define the sound. I wanted to make an album that makes you want to be experienced live. And so it's become an album with action that you can dance to."

In fact, Niels Frevert sings with his rough scratchy voice in "Weite Landschaft" to initially solemn, then increasingly driving, almost hectic beats about the fact that we are building everything. So it says in the chorus: "It was a wide landscape before you burned it down. It was a wide landscape before you built a skyscraper on it."

No matching drawer

"Frem in der Welt" is also a restless, hopping, groovy song with a clearly pop chorus, in which Niels Frevert sings: "I'm spinning in circles, pirouettes on thin ice" and "I'm singing in a cage in which the algorithm doesn't work". That sounds almost biographical, because the songwriter doesn't really seem to belong anywhere, doesn't seem to fit into any drawer. And apart from the fact that he releases an album every few years and goes on tour, little is known about him because he loves to disappear into the anonymity of the big city until he has collected enough stories to set music to music and on a new one album tells.

Despite all the pop innovations, the musician remains true to himself in one respect: he seasons his songs with his typical portion of melancholy. A prime example of this is "Dreams don't stop at daybreak", which also comes along rhythmically and with synthesizers, but states thoughtfully and melancholically: "Just get away from here, it's better everywhere else". This song has a clear biographical reference. Niels Frevert says: "The protagonist is young F., for whom songwriting has become an island and who is being drawn away from the suburbs. He would like to move to the big city and experience something. I also made my way relatively early to St. Pauli to look around in the dangerous big city. But the whole thing is a metaphor for dreams, for goals that you want to achieve. Something that hopefully never stops, even with age. That you don't get comfortable and rest ."

Do not stop

That's also why he wants to develop a little further with every new album, just don't stand still. "Of course that puts me under pressure, but that's good, I need it," says Niels Frevert. For "Pseudopoesie" he looked for a new producer, the Berliner Tim Tautorat, with whom he recorded the songs in just six weeks. "For me, this is an extremely short period of time," says the musician. But the work went extremely well and "Berlin radiates energy and you can tell that from the album."

The mixture of the melancholic "Ende 17", the feel-good song "Tambourine", which encourages you to dance, and the almost jazzy "clattering of dishes" is as colorful as life and the big city. For lovers of little stories, good lyrics and varied music, "Pseudopoesie" is a great record to listen to, discover and empathize with.

"Pseudopoesie" will be released on March 24th by Greenland Records, Niels Frevert will be on tour from April 19th to May 20th.