Projectors

Light in the Machine

A projector does two things at once. It throws light forward, casting images onto a surface that can receive them. And it holds a reel in place, running the same frames through the same gate, again and again. Both motions, the projection outward and the repetition inward, are embedded in The Notwist’s song of the same name. It is a piece about what we carry forward and what we keep returning to, about how the act of witness and the act of endurance are, in the end, the same gesture.

The band offered a striking conceptual frame for the song: the lyrics are written as if Rutger Hauer’s dying replicant Roy Batty might sing them.^[1] That reference lands immediately for anyone who knows Blade Runner. Roy Batty’s final monologue is one of cinema’s most celebrated death scenes, a moment in which an artificial being, on the threshold of extinction, catalogs everything he has witnessed and mourns its passing. There is something about the beauty of irreversible loss in that scene that The Notwist found useful. But they do something unexpected with it. They turn the template inside out.

Weilheim to Munich: Thirty-Five Years in the Making

The Notwist formed in 1989 in Weilheim in Oberbayern, a small Bavarian town that punched well above its weight in terms of the experimental music it produced. Brothers Markus Acher and Micha Acher, along with drummer Martin Messerschmid, began in the hardcore and punk underground and spent the following decade systematically dismantling their original sound and rebuilding it from strange materials.^[2]

Their 1995 album 12 marked their first significant turn toward electronica, and the arrival of electronic musician Martin Gretschmann in 1997 deepened their palette considerably. The jazz-inflected and glitch-laden Shrink (1998) built their European reputation. Then came Neon Golden in 2002, the album that introduced them to North American audiences and remains their most celebrated work, a record that fused heartfelt indie songwriting with glitch electronics and an almost optical sense of negative space.^[2]

News from Planet Zombie, released March 13, 2026 via Morr Music, is their eighth studio album and arrives five years after Vertigo Days. If that earlier record was shaped by isolation, this one was made in community. For the first time since 12, the full band gathered in a single room to record, spending one week at Import Export, a non-profit arts space in Munich.^[3] And for the first time in the band’s history, the songwriting itself was shared collaboratively, with Markus, Micha, and multi-instrumentalist Cico Beck writing together rather than orbiting Markus’s vision alone.^[3]

The album title draws on horror-film imagery as a frame for contemporary anxiety. Markus Acher described the premise with a kind of mordant humor: the state of the world at this moment resembles a very bad and unrealistic B-movie.^[4] But the album does not endorse the horror. It responds to chaos with warmth and generosity, insisting that collective paths forward remain available. The zombie conceit also carries a note of resurrection: dormant values, collaboration, communal presence, togetherness, being brought back to life.

The Replicant’s Warmth

The Blade Runner comparison is more precise than it might first appear. Roy Batty, in Ridley Scott’s film, is not purely a figure of coldness. He is a machine who has felt too much, who has accumulated experiences that no one designed him to have. His final words are not a system shutting down; they are a mind trying to hold onto what it has known. The Notwist borrowed that emotional structure, the urgency of witness before loss, but redirected it toward something warmer and more earthbound.^[1]

In “Projectors,” the lyrical concern is not with extinction or dissolution but with fidelity. The narrator articulates what it means to stay with someone through difficulty, to absorb their weight, to remain present when remaining present is hard. The imagery draws on elemental natural forces, things that hold their shape over vast timescales, to describe a purely human commitment. It is a way of saying that devotion, at its most genuine, has something of the geological about it.^[5]

This is the tension at the song’s heart. The Notwist took a framework borrowed from science fiction’s most iconic dying machine and used it to describe the most stubbornly human thing they could find: the decision to carry someone else. They navigate the border between synthetic and organic, as they always do, and they land, as they almost always do, on the side of warmth.^[1]

A Swamp Waltz with Harmonium

Sonically, “Projectors” is a departure from what longtime listeners might expect. The glitch electronics and processed textures that defined Neon Golden are absent here. One reviewer aptly described the song as “a lush and orchestral circus-music swamp-waltz,”^[1] and that description captures the song’s distinctive gait: unhurried, slightly unsteady, rich with texture. It is built from acoustic and semi-acoustic materials, with harmonium from Haruka Yoshizawa, clarinet from Tianping Christoph Xiao, trombone from Mathias Götz, and the guest vocals of Enid Valu threading through the arrangement.^[6]

Valu’s contribution is central. Her tone is deliberately unembellished, a flat and direct delivery that works against the orchestral lushness surrounding it. Rather than floating above the arrangement, she anchors it, giving the song a candor that the strings and brass alone might not achieve.^[7] The overall effect has been described as “bittersweet country-esque,”^[7] and that hybrid quality is real: there is something of American folk plainspokenness in the song’s bones, filtered through an unmistakably European sensibility.

Markus Acher, reflecting on the creative environment from which the album emerged, described an interest in “psychedelic folk, field recordings from Japan and clarinets, songs by friends, collaborators and musical heroes, old and new.”^[8] “Projectors” is the clearest expression of that ethos on the record. It sounds like a genuine hybrid of traditions, country and folk warmth, chamber orchestration, and the precise, meditative quality that has always been central to The Notwist’s sound, assembled without self-consciousness into something that feels inevitable.

Carrying Each Other Through

“Projectors” arrives at a moment when the cultural demand for exactly this kind of song, one that names the weight of the present without collapsing under it, is acute. The Notwist’s zombie framing acknowledges the ambient dread of contemporary life directly. But the songs themselves, and this one in particular, argue that the appropriate response to that dread is not despair or detachment. It is intimacy and presence, the choice to stay.^[5]

The song’s central act, of holding another person up through difficulty, carries an almost political charge in this context. Not the politics of slogans or arguments, but the quieter politics of refusal: the refusal to let the people around you disappear under the weight of things neither of you chose. That “news from planet zombie” might be awful does not mean, the song insists, that the human capacity for steadfastness has been extinguished.

Bandcamp Daily, in naming the record an Album of the Day, called it the band’s “most mature album to date,” noting that it “contains the most reflective material they’ve ever recorded.”^[3] That maturity is audible in “Projectors.” The song is not straining for effect; it knows exactly what it wants to say and takes the most direct path to saying it. After 35 years, The Notwist have earned the right to that kind of clarity.

What Gets Projected

There is a second reading of “Projectors” that does not contradict the first but sits alongside it. The song’s preoccupation with memory, with how accumulated experience shapes who we become, invites a more inward interpretation.^[5] In this reading, the act of projection is less about one person carrying another and more about a self carrying its own history forward, running the old reels, recognizing in what has been seen everything that makes the present comprehensible.

Roy Batty’s dying speech, after all, is ultimately about this: the terror of having one’s entire record of experience simply vanish. He is not mourning someone else. He is mourning himself, or rather, the irreplaceable archive of perception that constitutes a self. The Notwist’s lyrics, filtered through that template, can be heard as a meditation on the same anxiety, on what it means to have lived through things and to know that the living-through is not permanent.

The song holds both possibilities open. Perhaps the person being carried is another human being. Perhaps it is a version of oneself, a younger self, a past self, the person one was before the world got so strange. The ambiguity is productive. It means the song can be received in different ways by different listeners without losing its coherence.

The Reel Still Runs

FLOOD Magazine noted that the album “could easily end up being regarded as the band’s most beautiful statement,”^[6] and “Projectors” is a central reason for that assessment. The song is not a highlight reel of The Notwist’s technical capabilities; it is something more lasting. It is a piece that knows what it is for.

For a band that has spent decades navigating the border between electronic abstraction and human warmth, “Projectors” feels less like an experiment and more like an arrival. The instrumental richness, the borrowed replicant sensibility, Enid Valu’s unadorned voice cutting through the orchestral swell: it all adds up to something that could only have been made by people who have been playing together, and thinking together, for a very long time.^[9]

The news from planet zombie may be grim. But the projector is still running. And what it casts onto the screen, in the Notwist’s telling, is not a horror film. It is a person, staying. A voice, carrying. A band, after 35 years, still finding new things to say about what it means to be here.