Empty Sea

Laura Carbone makes music that shouldn’t work but does. Dark and poppy. Black with light in it. Sad but hopeful. She started as a blogger, then became the frontwoman of Deine Jugend, a punk band she runs with Tim Bonassis, her producer and collaborator. Standard indie trajectory, except she actually followed through.

Her first solo album came out in 2015. Sirens was crowdfunded, self-driven, no label machinery. By then she already had songs that moved outside the German pop mainstream entirely—The Flowers Beneath Your Feet, Swans, Lullaby. The comparisons to PJ Harvey and The Breeders aren’t lazy. She has that same restraint, that ability to make darkness feel intimate and strange.

2019 brought her to America seriously. A tour across the coasts, down to South by Southwest in Austin. I didn’t catch it—wasn’t there—but people who saw her said the same thing. The recordings don’t capture what happens in the room. You feel the distance between songs more than you should, the silence between her and the band. She doesn’t fill space with charm or movement. Just stands there and sings things that hurt in specific ways.

I keep coming back to her music when I need something that won’t bullshit me. The German pop landscape is a specific kind of mediocre—slick, safe, designed to offend no one. She escaped it entirely. Just kept making what she wanted to make, which is the only real way to stay interesting.