A Hymn for the Fluorescent-Lit Waiting Room

Tuesday morning, nine o’clock, a Jobcenter waiting room—the German government’s unemployment and welfare office, where caseworkers hold minor bureaucratic power over your week and dispense it with the specific energy of people who stopped caring somewhere between their second and third year in the job. The ancient beige computers. The numbered ticket system. The shirt on the guy across the desk that tells a story you don’t want to hear.

Die toten Crackhuren im Kofferraum—"the dead crackwhores in the trunk," a name worn without a trace of irony—have written a song about those people. Jobcenterfotzen is the lead single from their new album Bitchlifecrisis, and it does something interesting with its target: it hates the workers and celebrates them simultaneously, treating the whole apparatus of bureaucratized misery as both perpetrator and victim. The video goes full documentary, all gray corridors and joyless desks, and manages to be funny and bleak in roughly equal measure.

The band have been absent for five years since their last record. They describe themselves as Germany’s last riot grrrl act, which is either accurate or the best piece of self-mythology in contemporary German music, possibly both. Bitchlifecrisis blends Electro-Clash with NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle, the angular German new wave of the early eighties), early punk energy, rap collaborations, and something they’re calling Trap-Punk. It’s more coherent than it should be.

By their own account, the five-year gap was spent trying to finally outgrow their extended adolescence. Naming the resulting album Bitchlifecrisis suggests the therapy produced mixed results. That’s exactly the right outcome for music this deliberately unhinged—if they’d actually resolved it, the record would have nothing left to be angry about, and the anger is the whole point.