Marcel Winatschek

What Comes Through the Television at Night

The video Rammstein released for Mein Herz brennt in late 2012 uses the piano version of the track—slower than the original from Mutter, more deliberate, and somehow more unsettling for it. Rammstein doing restraint is a specific variety of dread. The imagery goes where it always goes with them: children, darkness, a nocturnal gravity to Till Lindemann that sits somewhere between patriarch and something worse. The song has always been about that exact territory—the things that come through the television at night, that feed on children while they sleep—and the video earns the mythology rather than just illustrating it. I’ve had this track for over a decade and this version doesn’t diminish it. It just slows everything down enough to really see what’s there.