A commentary on my new album Horizon Tracks. Note: In addition to general statements about the album and its creation process, I’ve picked out a few tracks to write about here. Not every song on the tracklist will be commented on. Maybe I’ll make time for that another time.
A colleague once told me that he associated the band Bring Me The Horizon with me. I seem to reference them a lot, as they are one of my absolute favorite bands and probably my biggest musical influence besides Linkin Park. It’s only logical that this has an effect on the title of one of my releases … right?
No, Horizon Tracks has nothing to do with Bring Me The Horizon. But what does the title mean then? We have to travel two or, depending on how you look at it, even nine years into the past.
2022 and 2023 were two big years for me. I had a lot of time and muse for my music, had hundreds of monthly listeners from all over the world on Spotify and over 15,000 streams on one of my songs. I was also on the home stretch to finishing my second academic degree from a course I had started at the end of 2015. These years mark the end of an era that I am now leaving behind. A great time that I look back on fondly, but which fades into the background. Like a city that you have left behind, but which continues to loom on the horizon.
Horizon Tracks includes the 2022 and 2023 songs that I stand behind the most, musically and lyrically, and, despite their broad genre variance, combines them into a rock album that leaves a high stylistic diversity. The album ends with the instrumental track A New Beginning. A look into the future.
August 2024: Trapped
Trapped is my only real single in 2024. It made me wonder what the future holds for Project Delirium. The electronic sound of the song, which still has a very strong dramatic rock vibe overall, was a mixture that I really liked and seemed forward-looking to me. I started thinking about how I should sort myself out. In 2022, I followed a concept where a new single every month made more sense to me than an EP or album every few months or years. However, the result was quickly a colorful pile of different singles that no one could keep track of. And because I wanted to differentiate myself stylistically from my band Empty Eden, I also started to weigh up how my music should sound. I kept wondering whether certain songs weren’t too rock and would therefore be better suited to my other band. Such thoughts blocked my songwriting process and I decided to remove two songs from my discography that had fallen victim to unnecessary compromises and that I no longer stood behind.
In the end, I drew three conclusions from my deliberations:
1. Even as a small artist, I don’t have to shy away from EPs or LPs. I’d rather release a coherent body of work than create chaos in quick-quick mode.
2. I no longer make any genre compromises and only write music that comes from the bottom of my heart in every facet.
3. My existing tracks are best kept on an album rather than in colorful chaos.
And so I was able to set the attitude for the future. And the idea for Horizon Tracks was born.
Opener: Project Delirium
In 2022, I published a song on my old Spotify account (before Project Delirium, I was already publishing music under my real name), which was intended to guide listeners there to my new music project. I called it “Project Delirium”, just like my new project. Funnily enough, I was musically inspired by a track I hadn’t heard for years: “Hi Kids” by Cro, a German rapper who mainly wrote light-hearted pop, rap and party songs. Why not jump on the happy-clappy bandwagon? I wanted to write a song that talked about my new music but was also a happy catchy tune. The plan worked, and when I performed it for the first time, the audience sang along immediately. Since everything was right in that respect, I also released the song under my new artist name, albeit with a different spelling. As my distributor forbade me from releasing a song with the same title under two different artist names, I changed the spelling of the track to ProjectDelirium.
In the song, I gave an insight into my story, what motivated me to make music myself. It says:
Kleiner Junge, 15 Jahre
Im Gesicht die langen Haare
Erstes Festival, die ersten Shows
sah ich mir an und wusste: wow
Echt irre, was die da so machen
Geben mir zurück mein Lachen
Geben mir Sinn, Stück für Stück
und irgendwann geb ich’s zurück
Loosely translated:
A little boy, 15 years old
Long hair in his face
First festival, first shows
I watched them and knew: wow
It’s really crazy what they do there
Giving me back my laughter
Giving me meaning, piece by piece
and at some point I’ll give it back
Even though I stand behind the content, at some point I didn’t like the lyrical development at all. And musically, too, something was off. The headliners of the festivals mentioned were rock and metal bands who put their heart and soul into every facet of their music and didn’t play light larifari music to nursery rhymes. Not that I wanted to denigrate my own work. But this quick-release-every-month mentality meant that in this case I had a song that I couldn’t stand anymore. So I wrote a new song on the exact same subject. I called it Project Delirium, Pt. II.. Alongside a track called Schwarze Schleier Schwinden, ProjectDelirium was a song that I eventually deleted from my discography. Project Delirium, the opener of Horizon Tracks, is now the track that was once labeled “Pt. II” and tells the story of my motivation to make a change with my music.
Beat You Dead
Beat You Dead is one of the songs that stylistically fits in exactly with the direction I would like to take Project Delirium in the future. It’s somewhere between electronic synth rock and headbanger Nu Metal. It combines energy and heaviness with catchiness and has uplifting lyrics that have a certain poetic quality to them.
The lyrics are to be understood spiritually. It is characterized by a Christian world view in which good and evil are personified. Evil is the source of all worries, all sorrow and fears. Beat You Dead is intended to be a song that gives people strength and raises their self-confidence in situations in which suffering takes over. It is intended to make people feel that they are not at the mercy of others, but that they can immediately take control again. The listener should be able to look his spiritual adversary in the eye in a figurative sense and say to him with confidence: “I’m gaining strength to beat you dead”. The battle is over.
Halb Eins
Halb Eins is a song that could be placed in the same experimental corner as the two that have already had to leave my discography. As a fan of rock and metal music, many years ago it was considered a law that you had to hate rap. Especially in Germany, German rap is still considered the absolute opposite of rock music. But thank goodness bands like Rage Against The Machine, P.O.D. and later Linkin Park have done away with these prejudices.
If rap doesn’t fall into that cliché of always cursing and having questionable intercourse 👀 , it’s one of the most blatant musical stylistic devices to convey lyrics. Straight. Without beating around the bush. With confidence.
I actually got a lot to say about how that song came to my mind and what the lyrics mean. It’s one of the few ones I wrote in my mother tongue by the way. I’ll save that for another time. I’ll dedicate a whole separate blog post to the song. Until then, feel free to drop by here again, follow me on social media and stay up to date! See you soon.
