Berlin’s Güner Künier Unleashes Neue Deutsche Welle Mischief in Video for “Kes”

Neue Deutsche Welle was never merely a genre tag; at its best, it was a license for mischief, machinery, and bad behavior. Güner Künier carries that lineage into Kes, a Berlin-born blast of clipped rhythm and crooked wit that struts into the old house of social obedience and starts kicking the furniture over.

Künier, born in Izmir in 1990 and raised in Flensburg after her family moved to Germany when she was three, had already lived a few creative lives before arriving here: teenage bands, industrial engineering studies in Berlin, acting, then a jump into solo work in the early 2020s. That unlikely route gives Kes its charge. You can hear the compression in the track, all that pressure transformed into a sharp, gloriously unruly statement.

The song works like a blade flashed under fluorescent light. The beat is insistent, mechanical in the best possible way, with that stern body language you get from classic DAF when the groove lands like a command barked across concrete. Around it, the synths jab and smear and squeal with the kind of pop perversity that suggests Nina Hagen after too much coffee, or Malaria! smuggling art-school menace into a back room with a broken drum machine and a stack of bad memories.

Künier’s a knockout presence: she never sounds like she is delivering a slogan laminated for safe public display. She sounds alive to the insult, alive to the absurdity, alive to the old rotten scaffolding of patriarchal power and fully prepared to laugh in its face before setting a match to it. Kes is about autonomy, reclaiming speech, about making yourself heard in a world built to reduce women to decor, but it gets there with style, with speed, with a delicious sense of danger and cartoon exaggeration.

That spirit carries straight into the video, directed and arranged by Magnus Krueger, with photography by Schwund & M.K., styling by Klara Johanna Michel, and a special guest appearance by Cosey Mueller. The clip plays like a bizarre romp through a heightened realm somewhere between Pee-wee’s Playhouse and The Twilight Zone, all goofy velocity and crooked glamour, with Künier moving through it like the only sane person in a rubber room. Behind the madness sits Fabio Buem’s production, engineering, mixing, and mastering, which keep every element lean, loud, and slightly unhinged.

Kes feels like a public disruption. Bless it for that.

Watch the video for Kes below:

Listen to Kes via Spotify, or below, and purchase the single here.

Kes by Güner Künier

Upcoming shows include France, the UK, and Germany.

Facebook
Instagram
Spotify
Bandcamp

The post Berlin’s Güner Künier Unleashes Neue Deutsche Welle Mischief in Video for “Kes” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.