Four Bands Looking for a Break

The way emerging bands find traction sometimes involves climbing into a sponsored tour bus with a TV crew, competing against 550 other acts for a prize that amounts to a jingle deal with a mobile phone company, and hoping something useful comes out the other end. It’s a weird mechanism for discovering music. Then again, so is most of what actually works.

The four acts that made the final cut are an odd, interesting mix. KUULT are a three-piece from Essen—Chris Werner, Philipp Evers, and Chris de Crau—who’d only been together since October 2013 and were already selling out small clubs on German-language pop with real songs underneath it. Dead Sirius 3000 are Finnish, based between Cologne and Helsinki, and have the better origin story: Petteri Sariola, Tapio Backlund, and Jukka Backlund in a log cabin in Scandinavia, whiskey, a sauna, and enough songs for a full album by the time they left. They’d already done a Japan tour. They knew what they were doing.

Getting Private in Public are from Munich—friends since primary school, indie folk, the kind of band where you can hear years of playing together in small rooms. Pari San from Freiburg are the genuinely strange entry: a dreampop duo built around Parissa Eskandari’s voice being deconstructed and sampled in real time by DJ Paul Brenning, looped melody fragments layered over beatbox elements. Nothing else in the lineup sounds remotely like them.

Whether any of these acts needed to win a phone company contest to get anywhere is the real question. KUULT in particular had the momentum to find their own path—and did, eventually, without needing this particular door. But you take the platforms available to you, and a nationally broadcast web series with actual production behind it beats playing the same bar circuit for another two years. The cynicism about corporate music vehicles is earned. The bands inside them are still real.