Rathmann

From a Marburg release show to a national club tour

Rathmann come out of Marburg, the old university town in Hesse, and the paperwork still points to the countryside north of it: the band's own website carries an imprint address in Burgwald, a rural municipality in the Marburg hinterland. That provincial footing matters to how they write. The songs are in German, the references are local, and the ambition has so far been measured in club capacities rather than festival main stages.

When the Marburg magazine PHILIPP interviewed them on 8 March 2023, two days before a release concert at the city's KFZ venue, Rathmann were a four-piece. Magnus Ernst sang and played electric piano, Caro Sommer played guitar, Moritz Weishaupt played bass and Arne Wolff played drums. Asked to describe the band, Ernst offered "Indie Pop auf Deutsch" and admitted that an earlier self-description, retro, eloquent and danceable, no longer fitted what they were doing. Wolff preferred two words that pull against each other: demanding and catchy. The influences they named were deliberately unfashionable for an indie band, among them Lena Meyer-Landrut, whom Ernst confessed to a long phase of admiring, Damon Albarn, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sarah Jones, the drummer in Harry Styles's touring band. Their best-performing song on Spotify at the time was Guter Rath, and they promised to premiere a new one, Claire, at the KFZ show.

By the time promoters began listing the autumn 2026 dates, the billing had changed. Every venue page names a trio of Ernst on vocals, Weishaupt on bass and Wolff on drums. Sommer remains in the writing credits of the 2023 release as Caroline Sommer, but none of the material published around the new album addresses the change, so the reasons are not on the record.

Two six-track records, 2023 and 2024

The band's first collected statement was a self-titled release on 9 March 2023, produced by Kristian Kuehl and credited as a joint composition by all four members. Its six songs, Roter Wein, Yeezus Christus, Anna K., Der Clown, Alter Luxus and Die Party ist vorbei, run to under four minutes each and set the tone for everything since: short, sung in German, with titles that are half joke and half lament. The band's own description of what they play, dark guitar pop that is unpolished, raw, dirty and spacious but with a sense of romance, dates from this period and still heads their Bandcamp page.

The follow-up arrived on 7 June 2024 as the Kalifornien EP, again six tracks: Kalifornien, Claire, Grelle Lichter, Sommerblumen, Leicht and Paderbornia. Claire was the song they had debuted live in Marburg fifteen months earlier. The EP's framing text sets up the American dream of beaches and Hollywood and then undercuts it, with the band going looking for adventure under harsh city lights, tumbling from love and situationships back into loneliness, and concluding that California is not all glitter and glamour. The closing title, which sets the Westphalian city of Paderborn against the Pacific, tells you how seriously they take the fantasy.

Die Goldenen Zwanziger, the debut album

The first full album was trailed across 2026 in singles. Wenn alles vorbei ist came first on 20 February 2026. Der Test in deinen Fingern followed as a stand-alone track on the band's Bandcamp page. The third single, Warum tut Liebe so, was released on 26 June 2026 and is described on the band's site in terms that double as a manifesto for the record: a stubborn, deep staccato guitar, piano and bass melodies that circle each other, and the feeling of shimmering, lonely nights.

Die Goldenen Zwanziger itself is due on 2 October 2026 through Revolver Distribution Services, with ten tracks and a vinyl edition pre-ordered at €25 from the band directly. The title borrows the German name for the Weimar-era boom years, and the promotional text makes the irony explicit. The songs, it says, come from a present in which people lose their footing and relationships collapse, and in which the future reads as a question rather than a promise. The same text claims the record owes more to the Hamburg School of German songwriting, to Leonard Cohen, Big Thief and Dr. Dog than to current German indie pop, and that on it the band has arrived at a clear sense of itself and a sound of its own.

Where they sit in German indie

The comparisons the band and its promoters reach for are telling. The tour copy places Rathmann alongside Element of Crime and Udo Lindenberg, with Wanda and Faber as the names most often mentioned by others. What the band says it shares with those acts is sad and tragic lyrics that are nonetheless humorous and intelligent, and a claim to a sound not found elsewhere in the German indie scene. The arrangements are described as dry and direct, pulling in acoustic guitars or orchestral brass as needed, with drums that groove and push, and an overall sweep that swings between intimacy and what the text calls very big cinema.

Those are the band's words rather than a critic's. As of early September 2026, a month before release, no independent review of the album had been published, and the German music press had yet to weigh in beyond listings. The evidence of their standing is therefore practical rather than critical: a ten-track album with national distribution, a headline tour booked into established clubs from Baden-Württemberg to Berlin, and ticket prices between €10 and €20 that place them firmly at the grassroots level of the circuit they are trying to climb.

The show in autumn 2026

The Die Goldenen Zwanziger tour runs from the week after the album's release into late November. Confirmed dates include the Kulturhaus Schwanen in Waiblingen, near Stuttgart, on Thursday 8 October 2026, with doors at 19:00, a 20:00 start and tickets priced between €10 and €20; Karlsruhe on 10 October 2026; Naumanns Tanzlokal in Leipzig on 23 October 2026, listed from 20:00 to 23:00 with doors at 19:00 and tickets at €17 plus fees; and the Privatclub in Berlin-Kreuzberg on Friday 27 November 2026 at 20:00, from €19.40. The band had already played Leipzig earlier in the year, a Sunday-afternoon slot at 17:00 on 21 June 2026 at the WERK 2 Kulturfabrik.

On the Baden-Württemberg dates the support is Lehner, a band from the Stuttgart and Karlsruhe area whose music the promoters describe as direct and harsh, swinging between self-doubt, ecstasy, frustration and exuberance, setting pop against post-punk and rock against rap. The Leipzig listing names no opener. No setlists from the tour exist yet, because it has not begun, and the band has published no running time. What can be said is that the recorded catalogue now stands at twenty-two songs across two six-track releases and a ten-track album, almost all of them under four minutes, which points to a compact headline set in rooms that hold a few hundred people. Reviews and fan reports of these shows will only arrive once the first dates have been played in October.