The Yourfone Songcontest
Four bands are competing to write a jingle for a German phone company. Not as a punchline or a viral moment—there’s an actual process. A tour bus with custom art by Berlin street artists. A web series. A final live event in Hamburg where the winner gets their song turned into a commercial.
KUULT formed in Essen in October 2013 and somehow skipped the grinding-it-out phase. Chris Werner sings, Philipp Evers plays guitar and keys, Chris de Crau is on bass. They fill venues with Deutschpop, covers at first but increasingly their own material. The kind of band that makes you wonder what they’re doing right that everyone else is missing.
DEAD SIRIUS 3000 has a better origin story. Three Finnish guys—Petteri Sariola, Tapio Backlund, Jukka Backlund—rented a cabin in 2011 to drink whiskey and use the sauna and fool around with instruments as a side thing. They came out with songs for a full album. Each had already played in successful projects. All three had history with Sunrise Avenue and other bands. This felt like something else. They’ve toured Japan. They live between Cologne and Helsinki.
GETTING PRIVATE IN PUBLIC comes from Munich and is the opposite: four guys who’ve been friends since first grade, making music the whole time, their current band two years in. Indie-folk hybrids, what they call music that hits the heart and the legs. They put out No lessons learned
in 2013.
PARI SAN is the wild card. Parissa Eskandari sings. Paul Brenning produces, samples, beatboxes, takes her voice and fragments it and multiplies it until it becomes something else entirely. Dreampop run through effects and deliberate chaos. Nothing straightforward about it.
A phone company decided to run an actual competition with actual stakes and resources. Not the standard commercial-music grind. Four different sounds meeting in one contest, four different visions of what a song can be. The absurdity is built in, and yet something about it works. One of them will win. Their song will become a yourfone jingle. And somehow that’s not embarrassing, it’s just the thing that happened.