"You ride over the Zwickau hills to the northeast. The leather reins cut into your frozen hands as hot and sour sod burns its way upwards.

Metaphysical hangover sweat stabs through your skin pore by pore, through a faded coffin tattoo on your forearm.

The tired feet in your father's NVA boots clutch the flanks of a steaming, gray Appaloosa, or is it just the souped-up Simson S51? It doesn't matter, because it's actually your very own mind-machine, in which you wander through the ruins of self-awareness, following the call of emptiness.

To Chemnitz - the San Francisco of the little man. What awaits you there, however, is not Bernd Spier's simple-minded Flowertime, but asbestos, Eternit and, above all, the cracks that run through it.

This is exactly where the songs on L'Appel du Vide's first full-length "Metro" condense into a 9-story high monolith of post-punk, death rock, synth and darkwave, which - once climbed - allows you to look beyond those genre boundaries.

A shimmering black Jenga tower of (East) German angst and uncompromising introspection.

Staggering so much more sincerely than Campino would have you believe in his rehearsed sideways tumbling dance of the center of society, he leads you away from the low-hanging fruit of the epigonal (post-)punk wind.

Towards the blossoming flowers of true music love. You've bitten down hard and kept at it, digging and sorting, reading the liner notes and, above all, listening to the many records.

We opened the drawers and left them open. Vocalist René laments into his own heart without airs and graces, without pointing fingers and immune to any zeitgeist hype.

The guitar saws, jangles and shrieks with hunger and yet is full. The rhythm section growls and rattles and bangs its way straight into the abyss, from which analog synths also emerge here and there for a quick breath of air.

You can actually hear the instruments breathing, the sound is so honest. Guitarist Flatty recorded the band at Studio Gloom in Chemnitz in early 2023.

But it's not just Saxony and the all too often invoked, musty roots of those who have been left behind.

There's Detroit, Frisco and Los Angeles. Manchester, New York and Portland. And just as Poison Idea's "Feel the Darkness" (to use a reminiscence) begins, "Metro" ends after 37 minutes of playing time - with naked piano.

In between: a kinship in force and attitude, only without metal and posturing. Just power and void.

And in the saddlebag an old photo of the sea, grainy, black and white and yet reflecting all colors.