Three Voices for Something You Can’t Quite Say

Marteria and Casper have been two of German rap’s most emotionally articulate voices for years—Marteria with his cinematic storytelling, Casper with the rawness he’s been honing since XOXO. Getting Kat Frankie into the same room adds something neither of them does alone: a folk-inflected tenderness that softens the whole thing without making it soft. "Denk an dich" is a love song, straightforwardly, but it has that quality the best collaborations sometimes carry—three people with entirely different vocabularies finding the same feeling and agreeing on it.

What I appreciate about both Marteria and Casper is that they’ve built careers on not pretending to be harder than they are. German rap has a long tradition of toughness-as-performance that neither of them particularly buys into. "Denk an dich"—think of you—is exactly the kind of title they’d both be comfortable with, and that in itself says something about where German-language music had arrived by late 2018. There was space for this. Someone made it.