Every definition closes off certain possibilities. Naming an experience can help us understand it, but a name can also become a verdict, reducing a person to one fixed account of who they are and what their wounds mean. Human beings are rarely so easy to settle. We contradict ourselves, bear the consequences of our choices, and continue to change even after others believe they understand us. Resistance may begin there: in defending the right to remain complex, unresolved, and unfinished.
Berlin post-punk and darkwave mainstays Golden Apes enter that unsettled territory with Resistance, the first single from The Sun Came Up Tremendously, their twelfth studio album, due September 18 through Icy Cold Records. Released today alongside a film written and directed by vocalist Peer Lebrecht, the song treats opposition as an internal friction: the force that keeps identity from hardening into a final shape, even when certainty would be easier.
Resistance opens on a resonant guitar figure, answered by a single low keyboard tone. Hi-hats enter with a dry sizzle; Christian Lebrecht’s bass gives the piece forward pressure, while wavering synths and Salomon Bosse’s drums steadily enlarge the frame. Once the heavier guitar figure lands, the track assumes the emotional scale of mid-’80s gothic rock. Peer Lebrecht sings in a deep baritone that stays composed as the arrangement grows dense, and the guitars follow the cadence of his lines with a spring-loaded post-punk lift before thickening between verses.
At intervals, the drums loosen into splashes, and the rhythm pulls back, leaving more air around Peer’s euphoric delivery. A clean, melodic guitar solo settles at the center point, almost plain in its design; its calm gives the vocal’s return greater weight. The measured bass, sober guitar tone, and baritone gravity recall Scottish cult band Lowlife, while the surrounding textures remain recognizably Golden Apes.
The band describes the song’s central idea in terms of identity, complexity, and damage:
“…Maybe that is the actual resistance. Not resistance against an external system, but resistance against final form. Against definition. Against the temptation to trade complexity for peace. Half-damaged instead of neatly resolved.
I am the enemy…”
Lebrecht’s film, based on a lucid dream by Vito Schneider, transfers that internal struggle to an abandoned clinical ward rendered in sickly greens and exhausted amber. A striped spinning top travels down an empty corridor; barefoot figures in hospital gowns occupy tiled rooms and enact private systems whose purpose never fully declares itself. One scrubs water from a floor into a bucket, another fills a bathtub, one drinks from a metal cup, and another holds an open umbrella beneath a dry ceiling. A solitary player moves grapes across a checkerboard, while a black telephone waits inside a star-lined suitcase. Elsewhere, a reel-to-reel machine runs beside clasped hands, as though recording testimony from a room that has forgotten its questions.
Golden Apes perform throughout the ward, each member stationed apart in bathrooms, bare rooms, and passages. High overhead angles flatten bodies into diagrams, while the repetition of circular objects—the spinning top, fruit, reel hubs, and drum heads—turns the building into a machine for processing unresolved thought. In the closing coda, a black-clad figure carries armfuls of hospital gowns into a laundromat and feeds them into a washer. The garments pass through one more cycle, suggesting cleansing, erasure, recurrence, or all three at once.
Watch the video for Resistance below:
For more than two decades, Golden Apes have moved among post-punk, darkwave, gothic rock, indie rock, and electronic experiment, bringing delicate guitar melodies, driving bass, and Peer Lebrecht’s sonorous voice into a language of their own. The Berlin group has appeared at Wave-Gotik-Treffen, Castle Party, and Murder of Crows, toured across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Russia, and shared stages with And Also The Trees, The Chameleons, Pink Turns Blue, Clan of Xymox, She Past Away, Whispering Sons, TRAITRS, Then Comes Silence, and A Projection.
The Sun Came Up Tremendously follows the band’s 2024 album Our Ashes at the End of the Day. Its ten songs were written between 2024 and 2025, then recorded and produced at Thommy Hein Studios in Berlin from late 2025 into early 2026. Resistance was mixed by Thommy Hein and Peer Lebrecht and mastered by Hein, who also contributes guest guitar. The current Golden Apes lineup comprises Peer Lebrecht on vocals and synths, Maximilian Hennig and Stephan Schönefeld on guitars, Christian Lebrecht on bass, and Salomon Bosse on drums.
“…o sun, that healest all distempered vision, thou dost content me so, when thou resolvest,
that doubting pleases me no less than knowing!” – Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia
Listen to Resistance below, and pre-order The Sun Came Up Tremendously through Bandcamp. The album arrives September 18 via Icy Cold Records.
The Sun Came Up Tremendously by Golden Apes
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The post “I am the Enemy” — Berlin Post-Punk Veterans Golden Apes Confront the Half-Damaged Self in Video for “Resistance” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
