Herbertstraße

Nisse’s new album is called Ciao. The first single is Unmöglich—Impossible. Once you know his story, that word makes sense.

He was born in a storm in August, somewhere in south Hamburg, in the dead zone between farm country and the industrial Phoenix district. Growing up there was bleak: drunk teenagers, fistfights, tuned cars, the kind of boredom that calcifies into cruelty. The only real thing was the music. He found the 80s German voices—Drafi, Ideal, Falco, Reim, Kunze, Lindenberg, Nena, Reiser—and they became the shape of how he heard the world. Michael Jackson showed up on cassettes. In the 90s he went to school in England, which is where the absurdity kicks in: surrounded by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he fell in love with German hip-hop through CDs mailed from home.

At seventeen he moved to St. Pauli and got a window overlooking Herbertstraße. That street is a famous institution in Hamburg—where the sex workers have always been legal, where you can see how the city’s underbelly actually functions. Sirens all night. He was living in the center of a contradiction, watching how people survive when survival is the only option. That does something to you.

Two albums now, and Impossible is what he called his new statement. There’s a logic to it.