Not Maeckes, But Moving Like Him

Maeckes has been on heavy rotation here since Tilt dropped, and if I had to pick one track to carry me to the grave, it would be "Tisch"—the duet with Balbina where they spend four minutes agreeing that being incapable of making a decision is simultaneously the most liberating and the most aggressively selfish position a person can hold. Something in that paradox stays permanently true.

Maeckes—the blonde one from Die Orsons, a German hip-hop collective, a fact that appears in every write-up about him as though it were a legal obligation—has made an album as strong as Zwei, which already felt like an unfair concentration of craft. Tilt brings in Tristan Brusch and Josef Hader, and its best moments—"Loser," the magnificently titled "Wie alle Kippenstummel zwischen den Bahngleisen zusammen," "Urlaubsfotograf"—don’t announce themselves as essential. They just quietly become that way, over repeated listens, until you can’t remember what you were doing before they existed.

The video for the title track features a man who is emphatically not Maeckes, moving with the precise body language of Maeckes, dancing to a song in which Maeckes insists he is not Maeckes. The world is already sufficiently incomprehensible—more so with every passing day. Might as well just dance at it wildly. That feels like the right call.