Ivo Martin

A guitar at six, and his father's record shelf

Ivo Martin was born in 2002 and grew up in Bornheim, on the flat land between Bonn and Cologne. The guitar arrived when he was six, and the material he learned on it came from his father's listening rather than his own: The Beatles, and Queen, whose A Night at the Opera he still names as the record he rates above the rest. That order of events shows in how his songs are put together. The acoustic guitar part carries the thing on its own, and the rest of the arrangement is fitted around it afterwards rather than the other way round.

The other half of his voice is the falsetto, which he uses as a working register rather than an occasional flourish, dropping into full chest voice when a chorus needs the weight. Promoters and festival billings describe the combination the same way each time, because it is the most reliable thing about him: a soft high register, a harder one underneath, and a guitar doing most of the structural work.

Turned down in Mannheim, signed in Berlin

After school he applied to the Popakademie in Mannheim, for the music-business side rather than the performing one. The panel turned him down and told him the reason was that he was an artist and did not belong on that course. He treated the rejection as a direction rather than a verdict and went at music full time instead.

What actually built the audience was a format he ran himself: short videos in which a word sent in by a follower is worked up, on camera, into a finished song. It is songwriting as a public process, and it produced a following that arrived already invested in how the material was made. His debut single, Verliebt, came out in 2022.

In 2023 he moved to Berlin as the music turned into work and a first label deal came through. He records for Epic Records Germany, Sony's German pop imprint, and has stayed there since.

Puls, and then a record made deliberately small

The debut album Puls landed in 2024 and was the record the 2025 touring was built on. It did the job a first album has to do — it gave him a set that did not depend on singles and a reason to move out of clubs and into halls.

What followed was smaller on purpose. MIT JEDER FASER, released on 5 December 2025 through Epic Records Germany, runs seven tracks in seventeen minutes. Nothing on it outstays its welcome, and the brevity reads as an editorial decision rather than a shortage of material.

PRIVILEG went out ahead of the EP and sets its tone: a song in which Martin examines his own advantages rather than anyone else's shortcomings, built on the plain observation that living as he lives and loving whom he loves is something he was handed rather than earned. WUNDERLICH took the video, and IRIS sits at the tender end of the record. The pairing of social self-examination with straight love songs is the closest thing he has to a signature, and it is what the October shows are being built around.

The summer of 2026, and where that leaves him

Martin worked the German-language festival circuit hard this year. He played Das Fest in Karlsruhe on 23 July, in a Günther-Klotz-Anlage slot running 17:30 to 18:30, then Szene Openair at Lustenau in Austria on 31 July, Sound of the Forest at the Marbachstausee near Erbach on 1 August, Zeltfestival Ruhr at the Kemnader See in Bochum on 31 August, and the Jetzt & Immer Festival at the Grüner See in Ratingen on 5 September.

That run of early-evening main-stage slots is the immediate context for October. Eleven dates are on sale across three countries: Vienna's Raiffeisen Halle im Gasometer on 11 October, the TonHalle in Munich on the 12th, Komplex 457 in Zürich on the 13th, the Wizemann hall in Stuttgart on the 14th, the Aladin Music-Hall in Bremen on the 16th, Stromwerk in Dresden on the 17th, the Palladium in Cologne on the 18th, Batschkapp in Frankfurt on the 20th, Docks in Hamburg on the 21st, the Felsenkeller in Leipzig on the 22nd, and the Columbiahalle in Berlin on 24 October.

The trajectory is visible in the room bookings. He played the Gasometer in Vienna on 18 April 2025 and Docks in Hamburg on 11 April 2025, on the run that followed the Sonnenuntergang shows and moved him up from clubs into halls. In October he returns to both, on a longer itinerary and with a newer record to play from.

What the tour is trying to be

The billing for MIT DIR WIRD MIR WARM is unusually specific about intent for a tour trail: new songs at the centre, an evening pitched as close rather than large, with the falsetto, the full voice and the guitar doing the work. The word the promoters keep returning to is warmth, which is also the tour title, and the practical consequence is that the production is not the selling point. The material is.

That is a real risk at this scale. A set that depends on quiet and on a voice moving between two registers has to hold a room the size of the Columbiahalle without the crutch of a big rig, and the festival slots this summer were the proving ground for it. The Karlsruhe set — thirteen songs in a sixty-minute window, opening on Bleib and running through Hallo, Mensch im Spiegel, Wunderlich, Mensch, Diese Eine, Privileg, Iris, Brenn für dich and Sehnsucht — suggests the answer is to keep the pacing moving and let the older, better-known songs carry the crowd between the new ones.

Küss mich remains the most-played song in his live history, followed by Diese Eine, Hallo and Mensch. None of those are from the new EP, which is the balance the October shows have to strike: an audience that arrived for the 2022 and 2023 songs, and a set that is being built around a record from December 2025.