JOEY BARGELD x KITSCHKRIEG - 1

German Hip-Hop knows him as Haiyti's congenial sidekick, Noisey was in love since day one. With his first EP with the KitschKrieg collective, Joey Bargeld is now stepping into the spotlight himself. It flickers, a matter of honor, darker than other people's holiday lights. Head off. Bass on. Lamps on. The last real punk is here.

At a time when anyone with a photo filter can unrestrainedly live out their celebrity fantasies, Joey Bargeld is a real exception. The Hamburg resident is a born superstar from the darkest underground, a mystery with a maximally engaging nature that you never really get to grasp on the other hand. He combines the abysses that we all have within us with the charisma of great front men like Johnny Rotten, Keith Flint or Quavo. He is a womanizer, weirdo and world star by birth. But he's also full of scars that suggest the breaks in his biography. Joey Cash is like you and me. Just a lot more of it.

After years of wandering aimlessly between music as a hobby and the streets as a life purpose, he has now found an environment in which his idiosyncratic, often disturbing style suddenly makes all the sense of the world. KitschKrieg leads him further away from his roots in street rap, into an indefinite darkness. Bargeld already worked with the production team from Kreuzberg for his Haiyti features such as “Akku” or “Zeitboy”; in February he was on a sold-out tour of Germany with the crew. Now they are continuing what once began with a magical studio moment after three days of complete madness in Berlin: letting go as a strategy, going crazy as a solution.

The opener “Cash Cash Cash” is an empowerment hymn, a theme song and the introduction to a new chapter, all at the same time. “I want cash, you want cash, cash / He wants cash, she wants cash, cash,” yells Joey Bargeld, a mixture of loud catharsis and quiet criticism of capitalism on an 808 basis. “THC” with Trettmann is probably the darkest stoner anthem of all time. And “Trap House” describes the whole misery of the eternal cycle of temptation and business: “Slowly the lights go out / One buys, one sells / Don't walk in the Trap House / a few go in, a few go missing. " That is the superpower of Joey Bargeld: to condense even the most complex relationships of human existence to their essence - and to draw you into your world without really knowing what is happening.

The last song “Bounce” is the party that, as everyone knows, always follows the hangover. It sounds as if Jungle was invented on Hamburg's Schanze district - before the advertisers came, of course. Trappy hardcore, bassline house, hardcore shouting, demolition. "Cash in the house, I swear everyone is coming," he slurps over the extra-raw breakbeat. Anyone who stays at home anyway shouldn't say they haven't been warned. More soon.