Who We Used to Be

The Question Written Into the Title

The title alone does a great deal of work. "Who We Used to Be" poses its central question in its very syntax. Not "who we are" or even simply "who we were," but specifically "who we used to be" - a construction that implies settled distance, that the departure from an earlier self has become so complete as to feel unremarkable. Before a single note sounds, the title has already staked out its territory: the continuous present of having become someone different.

This is not nostalgia in the sentimental sense. It is something more unsettling and more honest. The band Markus Acher leads has spent over three decades transforming, shedding sonic identities while keeping something essential intact. For a group that began in the German punk and hardcore underground in 1989^[1] and eventually built one of indie rock's most singular bodies of work, the act of looking backward at former selves carries particular weight.

A Song With a Long Life Before the Record

"Who We Used to Be" had an unusual path to the album. It made its live debut on November 9, 2022, at Kaserne in Basel, Switzerland^[2] - more than three years before "News from Planet Zombie" was officially released. In those intervening years it became one of the most frequently played songs in the band's live set, performed 28 times through early 2026^[2], a sign that it had found a particular resonance with audiences and perhaps with the band itself.

Its origins are equally specific. The song was first released as part of "COLORS," a compilation celebrating the 20th anniversary of Japanese indie label 7e.p.^[3] It later appeared on "Magnificent Fall," a rarities compilation released on the band's own Alien Transistor label in 2025^[3], before finding its final home in the album's tracklist.

That gestation period is itself a kind of illustration of the song's themes. It existed in one form, then another, then another. It became something different through time while remaining recognizably itself. The song about transformation was itself transformed repeatedly before it arrived.

"News from Planet Zombie" was recorded in a single week at Import Export, a non-profit arts and music space in Munich^[4]. The method was deliberately communal: the full expanded live band played together in the studio, the first time the group had worked this way since their 1995 album "12"^[4]. Markus Acher, Micha Acher, and Cico Beck were joined by Theresa Loibl, Max Punktezahl, Karl Ivar Refseth, and Andi Haberl, with additional guests contributing taishogoto, harmonium, clarinet, and trombone.

Stillness in Motion

On an album that opens with the unsettling momentum of "Teeth" and "X-Ray," "Who We Used to Be" arrives at track 8 as a kind of decompression chamber. Critics consistently noted its distinctive quietude. KLOF Mag described the band as "still more than adept at beautiful pensive numbers that charm you and make you misty-eyed in the process."^[5] Where much of the album leans into collective energy and rhythmic propulsion, this track pulls back to something more intimate: spare acoustic guitar, a delicate arrangement, and Acher's voice working at close range.

The contrast is not incidental. The album as a whole uses what Acher described as a zombie and B-movie metaphor to frame the state of the world: a reference to contemporary reality's quality of being surreal and unrealistic, like a bad film^[4]. In that context, a song this gentle functions almost as the eye of a storm. It does not deny the chaos. It insists on the value of what remains calm and human within it.

The Grammar of the 'We'

Much of the song's interpretive richness hinges on that first-person plural. "We" could be almost anything: two people in a relationship, a generation marking its distance from youthful idealism, a band reflecting on its own evolution, a community recognizing how much has transformed over years of shared history.

Markus Acher left the pronoun unexplained in interviews, and perhaps that ambiguity is intentional. His reflections on the album's themes often speak in collective terms: about the importance of togetherness, the value of close-knit collaboration, the weight of shared time. He described the album's underlying spirit as a response to forces that keep people isolated and apart^[4], a contemporary affliction that the act of making music together directly refutes.

In that light, asking "who we used to be" is not only a backward glance at lost innocence or changed relationships. It is also a question about what survives when the circumstances of a collective life transform beyond recognition. The "we" keeps existing even as everything that once defined it changes.

Time's River

Acher has spoken publicly about an image that seems to inform the album's deepest preoccupations: the Isar river in Munich, which he visits regularly. He described it as always the same but always changing, calming but also a constant reminder that time flows in only one direction and cannot be reversed, and that every moment is precious^[4].

That image captures something essential about the emotional register of "Who We Used to Be." The song does not rage against time. It does not attempt to return to anything. It holds the fact of change steadily, without flinching. There is something almost meditative in its composure: an acceptance that the former self is gone, that the "we" who used to be is as irretrievable as water already downstream.

This kind of equanimity can only be arrived at, not performed. The Notwist formed in Weilheim in Oberbayern in 1989^[1] and have spent more than three decades navigating their own transformations: from the punk and metal of their early years, through the electronic experimentation of the late 1990s, to the international breakthrough of "Neon Golden" in 2002^[1], and through lineup changes, side projects, long hiatuses, and returns. By the time they arrived at "News from Planet Zombie," they were a band that had genuinely inhabited the question this song poses.

A Stillpoint in a Restless World

Bandcamp Daily called "News from Planet Zombie" "their most mature album to date,"^[6] and that maturity registers most clearly in songs like this one. The critical reception was broadly strong: Kristan Reed called it "one of the German band's best-ever albums,"^[7] and multiple reviewers singled out the album's range, its capacity to be both forceful and tender, both anxious and serene.

In a cultural moment saturated with anxiety about collective identity, about who "we" are as societies and generations, the question "who we used to be" takes on larger resonances. The song does not offer an answer. It does not present a lost golden age to be recovered or a cautionary tale about what was squandered. It holds the question open, with the acoustic plainness of a melody that trusts its listener to supply the content.

That trust is a form of generosity. The song functions as a vessel rather than a message.

Multiple Readings

The song is open enough to support at least three distinct interpretive frames. In one reading, it is a meditation on an intimate relationship: the "we" is two specific people, and the song traces the melancholy of recognizing how much has changed between them, without blame or bitterness. The lyrical mode, as described by critics, is quiet and interior rather than confrontational^[8].

In another reading, it is an autobiographical reflection by a band on its own career. The Notwist cataloging the various versions of themselves they have inhabited and left behind. Given the album's recording method, the full live band in a room together for the first time in decades, this reading carries particular weight. The song about former selves was made by a group consciously revisiting a way of working they had also used to be.

A third reading is more broadly generational or political. The "we" is a cohort of people who remember a different world and carry the memory of who they were before some collective transformation. In the context of an album titled "News from Planet Zombie," a record steeped in the atmosphere of a broken and surreal present^[9], this reading connects the song's personal intimacy to the larger disruptions the album circles around. None of these readings cancels the others. The song holds them all.

What Remains

"Who We Used to Be" arrives near the end of an album full of noise and urgency as a moment of genuine pause. It asks its central question simply, without ornament, and then lets it resonate. The answer, if there is one, lies somewhere in the music itself: in the fact that the band is still here, still asking, still capable of this kind of quiet.

The question the title poses is one that anyone who has lived long enough eventually confronts. The people we used to be are real, and gone, and somehow still present in who we have become. The Notwist's particular achievement in this song is to hold that fact without grief and without denial, to acknowledge it the way one acknowledges the river: which has always been there and will be there long after.

In the architecture of "News from Planet Zombie," the song serves as an interior room, hushed and necessary. You can feel the band breathing in it. The B-movie chaos of the album's framing device falls away, and what remains is something much older and more specific: two syllables of a pronoun, a past tense, and an open question that the listener must answer for themselves.