Alligatoah

Alligatoah

Imagine you've been at the top of the German-speaking music world for a decade now. You've shaped a style, you've made your mark on the rap scene and pop landscape alike and you've played the country's biggest stages. Your trophy cabinet is bursting at the seams, every shot is seen as a hit, every new album seems to accentuate your legendary status a little more. Market researchers, label representatives and managers advise you to just keep doing what you're doing - no experiments that could shake the royal chair. And then you go into the studio, deliberately ignore the time-honored formula for success, risk everything without any necessity and produce ... a crossover album full of screaming vocals and wailing guitars. Alligatoah has done just that. His new record "off" confronts the zeitgeist with deafening edgyness, resembling an LP-turned-wrecking ball on the pop Olympus.

"off" is the "Hybrid Theory" in Alligatoah's discography. It marks the most consistent musical break in his almost twenty-year career on several levels, is a realized childhood dream, a logical consequence, an ambitious challenge and an almost unexpected reinvention. Let's not get it wrong: Alligatoah has surprised himself again and again over the years and across all his albums and mixtapes. He has always set out to grow, to dare, to learn - as a rapper, as a singer, as a lyricist, as a producer, as an actor, as an instrumentalist. What is new is that this time he risks a crossover balancing act over the length of the album; a crossover balancing act that could hardly be more ignorant of the mainstream sound of our time and is refreshing precisely because of this.

"off" is a loud, explosive mixture of different varieties of heavy metal and typical hip-hop beat patterns, crossing 90s nostalgia with a forward-looking attitude and Alligatoah-typical pop appeal. Howling electric guitars and three-dimensional double bass hammering exude a nu-metal aura and band feeling, with trap drum elements bursting into the scene from time to time. "off" sounds maximally full, powerful and largely analog, is a twelve-part tug-of-war between two contrasting sound worlds. For the first time ever, Alligatoah has involved co-producers in an album process, giving up minimal control - for the sake of the sound, the contrast, the experiment. To sharpen the metal aesthetic in colossal walls of guitars and organic drumming, he has brought his proven live guitarist Hannes Kelch on board. Deutschrap platinum producer Gee Futuristic is responsible for the 808 riffs that repeatedly break new ground throughout the track list.

To understand the vision behind "off", it helps to take a look back to the nineties - and into the childhood bedroom of pubescent village boy Lukas Strobel, who was just starting to take an interest in hardness in music at the time. He could do little with the majority of the songs on the endless tracklists on the Bravo hits CDs. He skipped the same songs by System of a Down, Limp Bizkit and Guano Apes over and over again - they sounded wonderfully incendiary and angry and had a lasting impact on Alligatoah's understanding of music. The first CD of his life, bought with his own pocket money? "Proud like a God" by Guano Apes. Twenty years later, Alligatoah is now thirty-four years old, and with "off" he sends out an idiosyncratic reminiscence of the heroes of his youth. Surreally, he was able to win over both Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst and Guano Apes in the full band line-up for feature parts - that is German music history, that is an unprecedented accolade, that is the fulfillment of a long-standing career dream.

Speaking of careers: Alligatoah had declared them over in the meantime. At least that's how he made it look. At the end of his sold-out final tour concert in Cologne's LANXESS arena in November last year, Alligatoah disappeared behind a large curtain adorned with the words "Gern geschehn - Alligatoah 1989 - 2023". In the wake of the first "off" single "SO RAUS", he quickly returned with a musical sign of life, but officially remained missing and has since had his legacy managed by fellow traveler BattleBoi Basti. Alligatoah has, according to the symbolic narrative, retreated to - or rather behind - the moon. He will observe the release of his new record from a safe distance and stay there for a while. Loosely based on the Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei, he gives the Earth the outstretched middle finger on the album cover in cell phone photo format. Sounds like a completely crazy play full of meta-levels? It is, Alligatoah style.

Despite the large-scale change of scenery, one thing has remained the same: When Alligatoah writes songs, he writes Alligatoah songs - sharp, clever, witty, self-deprecating. His strikingly theatrical phonetics are omnipresent, as is his penchant for changing perspectives, his preference for exaggerating opposites and the skillful articulation of the banal on "off". Alligatoah questions supposed normalities, takes contrasts to extremes in a battlerap style, weaves his way through precise theme songs and celebrates dialectics. The fiery, driving "NIEMAND" is a philosophical hymn to atheism with a bitter aftertaste: "You say: 'Who do you think you are' / I say: 'Who are you to believe? The song "WEIßE ZÄHNE", a duet with fellow rapper Bausa, is riddled with wild breakdowns and scratches and shoots against exaggerated self-optimization mania and disdainful bank employee bourgeoisie.

"PARTNER IN CRIME" with Tarek K.I.Z has a deceptively poppy feel, but is a love song formulated from the perspective of a mass murderer. The gloomy, whipping metalcore creation "WER LACHT JETZT" can be described as the protagonist's own self-discrimination. The glam rock reference "ICH ICH ICH", including its guitar solo played by thrash metal legend Mille Petrozza, is, well, the exact opposite: "Who gets a prize for modesty? Me, me me!" And so on. Let's be clear: clashing polarities run like a leitmotif through the lyrics and compositions of "off", lending the album a large part of its remarkable charge. In between? "SCHEIßDRECK" aka three minutes of crazy silliness in good old Alligatoah style: "'Do you have pain in your body?', I hear the masseur annoying". It has to be, we've loved it since 2006.

Back to the beginning. The thunderous opener "ICH FÜHLE DICH", in whose inner workings metal and hip-hop drums gallantly wrestle with each other, tells of the spookiness of attraction caused by love. The epochal "KÜSSEN" takes a similar tack, dealing with the questionable cultural practice of crossing tongues. In "ES KRATZT", Alligatoah exaggerate the painful world view of an oversensitive hypochondriac; in "MENSCHLICHES VERSAGEN" - the aforementioned feature with Guano Apes including a German (!) part by singer Sandra Nasić - the well-known moment when you realize you've made a mistake is described. What unites these pieces is the intention to transform intense millisecond moments into expansive, detail-obsessed art - colored snapshots in song form, if you will. Then there is, logically, "SO RAUS", this tongue-in-cheek rejection of the zeitgeist, for which Alligatoah was able to engage Fred Durst. And, of course, the brilliant finale: a raving reinterpretation of the No Angels classic "Daylight in Your Eyes", for which the metal band backdrop radically erupts one last time.

Alligatoah has played the "Rock am Ring" mainstage several times, has gone "Gold", "Platinum" and even "Diamond". He has several million monthly listeners on Spotify, has been constantly enriching the German-language pop landscape for years with unconventional masterpieces and oscillates superstar-esque between the aerie of needles and the moon. When the master of confusion faked the end of his career a few months ago, many thought he had achieved everything anyway and could draw a line under it with a clear conscience. He has indeed achieved everything ... But he still hasn't done and said everything that needed to be done and said - as "off", his seventh album to be released on March 22, 2024, proves