The Love Song at the End of the Party

SXTN built their reputation on songs that were deliberately, joyfully ugly. Party anthems with no apologies—Berlin street slang, sexual aggression, the kind of gleeful antisocial energy that made you feel like you were crashing a gathering you weren’t invited to and absolutely didn’t care. Bongzimmer. Von Party zu Party. Fotzen im Club. Songs that told you exactly where they were made and didn’t feel the need to explain themselves.

Juju—Judith Wessendorf, from Neukölln in Berlin—and her SXTN partner Nura spent a few years as the voice of a generation that lived entirely in the present tense. No tomorrow, just the party and the döner shop after. What made Juju particularly compelling was the unapologetic aggression of it: she showed a generation of young women that hip-hop’s male-dominated wall wasn’t something you politely knocked on. You kick it in.

Now they’ve gone their separate ways to pursue solo work, and Juju is up first. The album Bling Bling is coming, and she’s teasing it with characteristic confidence: It won’t be ’female rap in German’—it’ll be ’this album destroyed everything.’ She has the gold records to back it up. Melodien with Capital Bra hit number one. Half a million Instagram followers. She earns her big mouth.

But then she went and did something I wasn’t prepared for. She teamed up with Henning May—lead singer of AnnenMayKantereit, a German indie band, a voice that sounds scraped off a harder decade than the one he probably had—and together they made Vermissen. A love song. The word means "to miss someone," and the song does exactly that: quietly, precisely, no shouting required.

The contrast is what gets you. From Fotzen im Club to this. It’s not a contradiction—it’s just what happens when someone who has always been brutally honest finally arrives somewhere still. I had to stop what I was doing. I’m not ashamed to say I cried.