Lebanon Hanover

Sunderland, Berlin, and a name borrowed from New Hampshire

Lebanon Hanover formed in Sunderland in 2010, an unlikely base for a group whose sound was already pointed at the early 1980s. Larissa Iceglass, Swiss, took vocals, guitar and synthesiser; William Maybelline, British, took vocals, bass and synthesiser. The name comes from two neighbouring towns in New Hampshire, chosen for the sound of the words rather than any connection to the places.

Their first show came in October 2010 at the King Kong Club in Berlin, the city that would shape the records far more than the north-east of England did. A 2011 split EP with La Fête Triste brought them to the attention of Fabrika Records in Greece, which has released almost everything they have made since and still handles the catalogue.

The working method has barely moved in sixteen years. Iceglass has described the aim plainly: the purpose was to make minimal, sombre music like the early 1980s, and the pair never rewrote the brief. Two voices trade lead across a record — his low and flat, hers higher and more brittle — over a drum machine, a bass line doing most of the melodic work, and guitar used for texture rather than riffs.

Seven albums, no widening

The catalogue runs to seven studio albums. The World Is Getting Colder and Why Not Just Be Solo both landed in 2012, followed by Tomb for Two in 2013, Besides the Abyss in 2015, Let Them Be Alien in 2018 and Sci-Fi Sky in 2020. The pace of roughly one record every two or three years slowed after 2020, and the gap before the next one stretched to nearly five years.

Tomb for Two remains the pivot. It produced Gallowdance, which setlist.fm has logged at more than 140 performances, comfortably their most-played song, with Totally Tot behind it on more than 120. Both still close out sets more than a decade later, and the pair have never shown much interest in retiring them.

The romantic relationship between the two ended in 2013, which would have finished most duos built this tightly around a male-female vocal exchange. They kept the band, and the breakup material that followed — songs about distance, failed romance and staying in a room together after the reason for being there has gone — became a large part of what the audience turned up for.

Asylum Lullabies and the turn towards the dirge

Asylum Lullabies arrived in July 2025 on Fabrika Records, the first album since Sci-Fi Sky. Eight tracks: Pagan Ways, Sleep, Torture Rack, Frosty Life, Waiting List, My Love, I'm Doing This For You and Parrots. The duo have framed it around mental-health collapse, a breakup and the wars running in the background, with Maybelline stating in interviews around the release that he dreads the future.

Reviewing it on 16 July 2025, I Die: You Die called the record their most convincingly dismal, and noted the deliberate reversal of direction: where Sci-Fi Sky leaned towards something that worked on a dancefloor, Asylum Lullabies favours full-on dirges. The same review singled out Torture Rack for its fragmented, exhausted arrangement, Iceglass's croaky delivery on Waiting List, and the closer Parrots as ugly and confrontational — atonal in a way the band had not previously risked at the end of an album.

Torture Rack was the lead single, released with a video ahead of the album. It has held a place in the live set since, and Parrots now regularly ends the night, which means the harshest three minutes they have recorded are the last thing an audience hears.

A documentary, a visa history, and a much larger map

The band's relationship with North America was broken for a decade by border bureaucracy. Visa problems killed their US dates in 2013, and a further request was refused in 2019. They did not play the United States again until October 2023, their first shows there since the Tomb for Two era. Those dates went well enough to justify everything that followed.

On 16 April 2025 they announced a North American run booked through the Persona Grata agency, the largest itinerary they had attempted on that continent. It opened on 20 October 2025 at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, took in Black Cat in Washington DC and a Halloween-weekend slot at Chicago's Sanctum Festival at Thalia Hall on 30 October, and included first Canadian shows in Toronto and Montreal. A second leg ran from 16 April to 2 May 2026 down the west coast and through the southwest, taking in the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, the Observatory North Park in San Diego on 1 May and Riverside Municipal Auditorium on 2 May. On 9 May 2026 they played the Pabellón Oeste at the Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City, a room far larger than anything they were playing five years ago.

Alongside the touring came A Beautiful Place, a 48-minute documentary directed by the Dutch photographer Isolde Woudstra, a friend of the band and the source of many of their press images. Shot on their 2024 European tour, it mixes concert footage with interviews and spends as much time on the audience as on the duo. Reviewing it in October 2025, DMovies praised its grasp of what a Lebanon Hanover show means to the queer and non-conformist crowds who fill these rooms, while finding the talking-head structure conventional and the pacing slow. It had its festival run at the 12th Doc'n Roll Festival in London, held between 23 October and 9 November 2025.

The set as it stands in 2026

The current show is tightly measured. At the Markthalle in Hamburg on 27 March 2026 the duo took the stage at 21:45 and finished at 23:00 — 75 minutes, 19 songs — with the Canadian post-punk pair TRAITRS opening at 20:30 after 19:00 doors. The set opened with A Very Good Life and moved through Ice Cave, Die World II and Kyiv, closing the main body with Totally Tot before an encore of The Last Thing, a Tobias Bernstrup remix of Babes of the 80s, and Parrots.

That shape has held across the year. Headline sets run to around a dozen or more songs drawn from across the catalogue — Saddest Smile, Better Than Going Under, Kiss Me Until My Lips Fall Off, Albatross, No One Holds Hands, True Romantics, Sadness Is Rebellion and Gallowdance recur — with Kunst, Schwarzenegger Tears and Alien appearing in longer encores, as at Mexico City on 9 May 2026, a 20:55 to 22:25 set. Festival slots are cut down: 12 songs at Amphi Festival in Cologne on 26 July 2026, in the exposed conditions of a 16:10 afternoon slot at the Tanzbrunnen, and a 22:50 to midnight set at Grey Scale Festival in Munich's Muffatwerk on 12 June.

This week, and where the year ends

September 2026 has taken them somewhere new. They played Shibuya Ongakudou in Tokyo on 7 September, made their New Zealand debut at Double Whammy in Auckland on 12 September — an R18 show, doors at 20:00, with online sales closed before the night — and cross to Australia for three dates: The Triffid in Brisbane on 17 September, 170 Russell in Melbourne on 18 September and the Metro Theatre in Sydney, all ages, on 19 September. Metropolis Touring announced the run on 6 February 2026 with a presale on 9 February and general sale on 11 February; by the week of the shows the promoter was listing the final 140 tickets for Melbourne. It is their second visit after a 2024 Australian debut.

The rest of the year is booked back into Europe. Lisbon's Lisboa ao Vivo on 20 November and Hard Club in Porto on 21 November are followed by Salzhaus in Winterthur on 3 December, Docks in Lausanne on 4 December and La Laiterie in Strasbourg on 5 December. A Polish run closes the year: B90 in Gdańsk on 10 December, Progresja in Warsaw on 11 December, Zaklęte Rewiry in Wrocław on 12 December and Klub Studio in Kraków on 14 December.