Hippie Trim

Out of Earl Grey

Hippie Trim did not so much form as regroup. When the German band Earl Grey, who had toured Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom, split in 2018, five of the players scattered across the Rhine and Ruhr region put a new project together without any online footprint at all. When Redfield Records announced the signing on 17 May 2019, the label admitted there was nothing for anyone to look up: no releases, no page, no history under the new name. The line-up was Malte Unnasch on vocals, Lukas Andrzejewski on bass and vocals, Moritz Mewes on guitar and vocals, Tristan Bäumer on guitar and Luc Jouon on drums. Redfield's A&R manager Christian Biehl said the label was convinced the band had not only the songs to please fans across several genres but an authentic personality to go with them.

The first single, Supersonic, arrived that May with a video. The debut show followed on 19 June 2019 at the Sonic Ballroom in Cologne, and it had sold out in presale weeks in advance. Before the year was out the band had also been added to the German dates of the American post-hardcore group Drug Church, an early break that would take on a symmetry of its own seven years later.

Cult, and six commandments

The debut album, Cult, came out on 29 November 2019 through Redfield Records. In an interview with the German hardcore site Away From Life on 14 December 2019, Andrzejewski described recording it at Pitchback Studios in Frankfurt with producers Lukas and Patrick, finishing in seven days instead of the ten they had booked and calling the atmosphere familial. The title was not about the band, he said, but about the people who had connected with the songs, a unity among like-minded listeners. To underline the point they wrote six commandments, a loose life philosophy about surrounding oneself with people one loves and not passing judgment on others.

Asked about 2020, he was candid that the band's touring depended on promoters and venue bookers coming to them, and pointed instead to a release show fixed for 14 February 2020 at the Sonic Ballroom. He listed the reference points plainly: Title Fight, Drug Church, Balance and Composure, Superheaven, Pity Sex and the Tom DeLonge era of blink-182.

What Consumes Me and the Markson connection

The second album marked a change of label and a change of scale in how the records were finished. What Consumes Me was released on 16 September 2022 through Supervillain, preceded by the singles Pain Ball and Hooked On U. The band recorded it with Patrick Bayer and Lukas Rauderberg at Goldengrey Studios in Frankfurt, then sent it across the Atlantic: Jon Markson, known for his work with Drug Church and Such Gold, mixed it at The Wolf Den in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with Alex Salter assisting, and Adam Cichocki mastered it at Timber Studios in Bayonne, New Jersey. Markson also sang additional harmonies. Philipp Baum shot the cover.

The eleven tracks run short. Control is barely a minute, Toothpaste ninety seconds, and only Fade, Hooked On U and Steady Dreaming push past three and a half minutes. The band's own Bandcamp notes describe the mood as grungy, hardcore and shoegazey, and single out Dead Heat as an anthem. A release show at the Sonic Ballroom on 2 October 2022 put them on a bill with Tristesse and Raw Plastic.

Interviewed by the American site No Echo on 25 April 2022, Andrzejewski confessed that describing the sound was the hardest question he got, and that he usually reached for terms nobody knew. He called Pain Ball an ode to friendship, and when the conversation turned to the state of the German scene he said only that he hoped it would improve at some point. That summer they were booked to support Fiddlehead alongside Raw Plastic.

Morbid Orbit and the Trophy Eyes run

Away From Life announced the follow-up EP on 23 March 2024, sharing the single Falling Down, a song the band described as being about the struggle against the relentless passage of time and the pressure to conform. Agent Mayhem had already been released, and its video, in which the band play things for laughs, drew notice. Morbid Orbit came out on 31 May 2024 through Supervillain, on limited seven-inch vinyl and digitally, four tracks in all, with Markson and Cichocki again handling the mix and master.

Reviewing it on 25 May 2024, Away From Life's writer Flo judged that the EP captured the band's sound in condensed form, a blend of hardcore, punk and indie with fat, crystal-clear production, and docked it only for ending two of its four songs on fade-outs. Visions, the German rock monthly, listed it on the day of release. The record was launched on the road: throughout April 2024 Hippie Trim supported the Australian band Trophy Eyes through Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Wiesbaden, then on to Milan and Munich.

Two quiet years, then Up In Smoke

After Morbid Orbit the releases stopped, though the shows did not. On 20 June 2026 the band opened for the Canadian punk band The Flatliners at Hole44 in Berlin on the Cold World European tour, and the same weekend, 19 to 21 June, they were part of the seventy-plus-band Farewell Youth Fest in Dresden. A week later, from 26 to 28 June, they played Actitud Fest in Vidreres, Spain.

The new music finally landed on 10 September 2026, when the Belgian site GRIMM Gent premiered Up In Smoke, the first Hippie Trim single since the EP. The band's statement was bleaker than anything on the earlier records: the world was getting crazier by the day, things once viewed sceptically were now normalised, facts had become relative and truth no longer mattered. No album has been announced alongside it.

Back with Drug Church

The single arrives three days before a tour that closes a loop. Hippie Trim are the opening act on Drug Church's September 2026 European run, the band whose German dates they first tagged along on in 2019, and whose mixer they have shared ever since. The route starts at Dynamo in Eindhoven on 13 September, then Logo in Hamburg on the 14th, the Frannz Club in Berlin on the 15th, Klub 2progi in Poznań on the 16th, Strom in Munich on the 18th, Slaughter Club in Milan on the 19th, Das Bett in Frankfurt on the 22nd and Luxor in Cologne on the 23rd. A final date on 25 September at Mojo's in Mönchengladbach, close to home, adds Still In Love to the bill.

The Poznań listing gives the bill order as Drug Church, then the American band Liquid Mike, then Hippie Trim, with doors at eight. Songkick shows six of the dates on sale as of this week, all in rooms of club size, with the Hamburg and Berlin nights drawing the most interest from the 1,041 people who follow the band there for alerts. For a group that once said its touring depended entirely on being asked, the asking has been steady.