The Monster Gets the Controller
Sometimes you hear someone for the first time and what arrives isn’t exactly "this is good" but something more like "this is going to be something." Alli Neumann is 21, started as an actress—her film debut was in Kim Frank’s Wach—and her first EP announced a voice occupying that strange and exciting space between sharp pop craft and genuine weirdness. The new album is called Monster. It earns the name.
The comparisons that come up are the right ones: Falco, the Austrian genius who gave the world "Rock Me Amadeus" and understood how to make German sound like the most seductive language on earth; Nina Hagen, Germany’s punk patron saint whose range was always more theatrical event than mere singing; Udo Lindenberg, the leather-jacketed rock elder who turned German into a viable rock and roll instrument before anyone thought that was possible. Neumann is all that genetic material recombined into something contemporary and specifically hers. The songs are in German, which matters—not as a nationalist point but because German pop this sharp is rare enough to mark.
The title track is where everything clicks. After an epic Old Hollywood intro—full orchestration, the works—she slides into the groove with a quality the German exaltiert describes better than anything English offers: theatrical, heightened, knowingly excessive. Producer Franz Plasa was in the studio with Falco for "Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da," and that lineage is audible in the production—the eighties are in the DNA without the album becoming a retro exercise. The subject is a modern one: in a neoliberal society engineered for elbows and performance, the fastest path to the top often involves simply deciding to be the monster rather than fear it. Hatte ich nicht gesagt es tut mir Leid, aber das Monster ist da
—didn’t I say I was sorry, but the monster is here—delivered with a grin that makes clear she’s not sorry at all.
What keeps it from being merely clever is that it never sounds like a thesis statement. The darkness is wrapped in charm, the critique in a Koketterie that never tips into too much. Könn’ wir bitte wieder spielen? Ich lass dich auch nicht verlieren
—can we play again? I’ll even let you win—and the whole attitude is #sorrynotsorry, except it goes down easy, without the aftertaste of someone trying too hard. Alli’s monster plays in an arcade game. The controller belongs to her. Good luck taking it.