Altered Rebirth

Out of the Rhine-Main

Altered Rebirth come from the stretch of Hesse where Frankfurt am Main runs into Wiesbaden, and the band gives both cities as home depending on which page one reads. Their Bandcamp profile pins them to Frankfurt and files them under metalcore. The Forest Metal Festival, which has booked them, describes them as a German dream-metal band from Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden. The band's listing on the German musicians' network Backstage PRO dates the formation to 2023, which makes them very young by the standards of a scene in which acts routinely take a decade to reach a second record.

The core of the group is two people. The credits on the debut EP name Thomas Steier and Silas Schmidt as the writers and performers of every track, with no other musicians listed. That is the whole band on record: a duo who write, play and arrange the material themselves and then hand it to an outside engineer to finish. Whether the stage line-up is larger is not something the band has documented in any source found for this profile.

What they are trying to do is set out plainly in their own words. The strapline on every release page reads "stay 'til dawn in this eternal night", and the festival's programme copy describes a modern mixture of powerful music, cinematic sound-worlds and distinctive vocals, with emotional lyrics, characteristic guitar work and dreamy synthesisers blended across several metal subgenres. The Bandcamp tags fill in the technical side: deathcore, metalcore, modern metal, djent and, tellingly, "dreamy". The intent is heaviness with a soft, half-asleep edge, and the record sleeves and song titles carry that idea further than any press release does.

Reaching Moonlit Salvation: a record about not sleeping

The debut EP, Reaching Moonlit Salvation, was released on 4 October 2024. It runs to eight tracks and just over thirty minutes, and it is built like a single piece rather than a collection of singles. It opens with a two-and-a-half-minute overture, Longing For Penance, and closes with its longest track, Cold Hands From Another Realm, at a little over five minutes. Between them sit We'll Never Sleep Again, The Dream That Never Was, Toxic Insomnia and Eternal Paralysis, with a fifty-two-second interlude, The Glitter In The Shadows, splitting the running order in two.

The titles are not decoration. The Forest Metal Festival's notes on the band say the debut EP deals with the members' own experiences of depression and sleep disorders, naming sleep paralysis and insomnia specifically. That gives the record its throughline: the sleepless night as the setting, and whatever visits during it as the cast. The third track, Devourer Of Dreams, carries the Japanese character for the baku, the folkloric creature said to eat nightmares, in its title, and it features a guest appearance from XO Armor, the only outside voice on the record.

Steier and Schmidt wrote and performed everything, and Jonathan Aßheuer produced, mixed and mastered the EP. No label is credited anywhere on the release, which points to a self-released record, and that reading is consistent with everything else the band has put out since.

Nethersun and the singles that led to it

The follow-up, Nethersun, was released on 2 July 2026. It is a six-track EP with every song running between four and five minutes, and it is noticeably more even in shape than the debut: no overture, no interlude, six full songs. The order is Angelmaker, Mirage, Forever Night, The End Is Not The End, Crooked and Swallow Whole. Mirage carries a guest vocal from Connor Mayeros, credited on the track itself.

Five of the six songs also sit as standalone entries on the band's Bandcamp page alongside the two EPs, which indicates that Angelmaker, Forever Night, Mirage, The End Is Not The End and Crooked were put out individually in the run-up to the record, with Swallow Whole the one track held back for the full release. The End Is Not The End has an official visualiser on the band's YouTube channel. Beyond the track list and the guest credit, the Nethersun page carries no production credits, so whether Aßheuer returned behind the desk is not confirmed.

Taken together the two EPs give Altered Rebirth fourteen songs and just under an hour of recorded material, which matters for a band whose next step is a headline set of their own. The second record's longer, steadier songs also suggest a group that has settled on what it does and is refining it rather than casting around.

Where they stand in September 2026

Small, self-directed and busy is the fair summary. Altered Rebirth have two EPs inside two years, a booking on the Forest Metal Festival bill, and a hometown release show scheduled at Frankfurt's Elfer Music Club on 11 September 2026, sold through the Universe ticketing platform under the name Nethersun Release Show. That places the band at the club-and-festival tier of the German scene, playing their own city and the regional festival circuit rather than touring nationally.

The evidence trail is otherwise thin in the way it usually is for an act at this stage. This research found no reviews of either EP in the established metal press, no long-form interviews and no published setlists. The reference pages that do exist, on Metal Music Archives, Backstage PRO and the German events site Rausgegangen, are directory listings rather than criticism, and several of them refused to serve their pages to an automated reader. What the band has published is its music, its credits and its dates, and this profile is built from those and nothing else.

What a show is like now

The current show is the Nethersun release show at the Elfer Music Club in Frankfurt on Friday 11 September 2026, listed for an early-evening start. The band has not published a support bill, a running time or a setlist for it, and no review of a previous Altered Rebirth concert could be found, so anyone expecting a detailed account of the staging will have to wait until someone writes one.

What can be said with confidence is what the material allows. With two EPs the band has enough songs for a headline set of about an hour without repeating anything, and the debut's overture-and-interlude structure lends itself to being played straight through. The festival copy's emphasis on cinematic sound-worlds and dreamy synthesisers indicates that the electronic and ambient layers heard on record are part of the live presentation rather than studio dressing, though how a two-piece reproduces them on stage is not documented. The band's audience so far is a regional one, drawn from Frankfurt and Wiesbaden and the festival crowds of Hesse, and the release show is the first chance to see the Nethersun songs performed for the people who bought them.