Freedom is not the same as improvement, because freedom concerns our relationship to what happens, not merely the circumstances themselves. A prison can be renovated and still remain a prison in the mind. When suffering has organized your habits, loyalties, and sense of self, its removal may feel strangely like a loss. Anger often outlives the conditions that produced it because the body keeps yesterday’s argument alive. So when life improves, there is no commandment that says gratitude must arrive immediately. Sometimes liberation begins with allowing the old anger to exhaust itself, until you discover you no longer need it.
There is something peculiarly German about naming a post-punk record Kleinkunst, a word usually reserved for cabaret, small-stage performance, and other modest forms of cultural production, then filling it with the psychic debris of cities built for industries that have vanished. Mottek87 comes from Duisburg, where structural change is hardly an abstraction.
Zbigniew F. and Jürgen W., longtime friends of Polish descent, formed the duo in 2024 after an evening of drinking beer and listening to records somehow turned into the decision to make one themselves. Their music has retained something of that unceremonious beginning: guitars, bass, programmed drums, sparse synthesizers, and German lyrics delivered with the plainspoken severity of people suspicious of excessive decoration.
The three songs on Kleinkunst: the title track, Oszillation, and Widerstand, concern a particular kind of estrangement, in which a person remains in the same place while everything that once made the place intelligible begins to vanish. Streets endure, buildings survive, names remain attached to maps, yet the internal coordinates have shifted. Mottek87 understand that structural change is experienced privately before it becomes a statistic. One person sees cleaner air and redevelopment; another sees an entire vocabulary of work, class, habit, and belonging becoming obsolete.
The music keeps that anger on a short leash. Prominent guitars recall Escape with Romeo and Pink Turns Blue, while the rhythm section has the economical discipline associated with early German post-punk and the sterner corners of Neue Deutsche Welle. Jürgen W.’s vocals lend the songs a dry Ruhr directness, carrying alienation without theatrical anguish. The arrangements leave considerable open space, which makes every bass movement and guitar phrase feel unusually exposed. Standout track Widerstand in particular has a rousing, sing-song chorus channeling Interpol.
Emotional intelligence sprouts from tension. Blossoms appear where dust once gathered, lungs clear, and the protective armor accumulated over decades becomes increasingly cumbersome. Improvement carries its own insult when it arrives after the world that required such protection has already been dismantled. “Kleinkunst is about realizing that change is not automatically freedom,” says the band. “Sometimes something gets better, and you still need time to stop being angry about it.”
Mottek87 record in a downtown Duisburg apartment with the shutters deliberately closed, sealing themselves off from the city they are attempting to understand. The method suits Kleinkunst. Resistance, in Mottek87’s hands, becomes less a heroic posture than an old reflex whose usefulness has become uncertain: a form of emotional muscle memory inherited from a place that keeps changing faster than its people can decide what they are prepared to surrender.
Listen to Kleinkunst below and order the EP here.
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