Stepfather Fred

School friends from Obergünzburg

Stepfather Fred began as a school band in the Allgäu, the hilly stretch of southern Bavaria between Kempten and the Austrian border. The members had been playing together since 2005 and formalised things in 2007, when Sebastian Schuster came in as singer alongside guitarists Simon Schweiger and Daniel Rolf, bassist Armin Wiedemann and drummer Christopher Wilhelm. Rolf left the following year, and the band has worked as a quartet for most of its life since.

The break came in 2010, when they won a band contest run by the regional paper Schwäbische Zeitung and took the slot on the Southside Festival bill that came with it. They were then picked up by ByOn, the Bavarian rock and pop funding scheme, which put them on support tours with Emil Bulls, Pro Pain, Biohazard and Hämatom — the kind of run that turns a regional act into one that can fill a 300-capacity room in a town it has never played. Summer Breeze and With Full Force followed, along with touring east into Russia and central Europe.

Six albums, mostly paid for themselves

The recorded work follows the same slow accumulation. A self-titled EP in 2007 and Stepfather Fred II in 2008 were homemade; the first proper album, Raise our Flag, is dated 2012 on the band's own discography page, though their English biography puts it a year earlier. Hello Larry Brown? arrived in 2014 and an acoustic EP, Unplugged and Handmade, in 2015.

El Puerto Records came aboard for Dummies, Dolls & Masters in 2016 — metal.de scored it seven out of ten — and Enhancer in 2018. Then came the record the band still treats as its turning point: Like the Sea – constantly moving, constantly drowning, released on 29 October 2021 after a long stretch of lockdown songwriting with nothing else to do. An EP of stripped-back versions, the Schleierfall-Session, followed in 2023.

The sixth album, Rubicon, came out on 4 October 2024. Twelve tracks, and by some distance the best-received thing they have made.

What Rubicon actually sounds like

The album is built on the tension the band has always worked — heavy guitars against arrangements that keep shifting underneath them. Reviewers picked out the range rather than the weight: Tripped my Demon lands somewhere near Five Finger Death Punch, sVenorita brings in Spanish guitar, Abacus has an obvious debt to Tool, and Collecting Faith is the straightforward singalong.

Powermetal.de's Björn Backes gave it nine out of ten and called it possibly the best album the band has released, praising the combination of thick guitar walls with unusual dynamism, and singling out Schuster as one of the most versatile vocalists in the scene — a man who works the full emotional range rather than shouting throughout. Metal Factory in Switzerland scored it 8.5 and reached for Sons of Texas, early Rev Theory and Tool as comparisons, describing the result as dirty street rock with a modern polish. That review also registered the one consistent criticism: stretches of unbroken screaming start to flatten out, and the album is better when the clean vocals come back in. Rock Hard lists Rubicon among the albums worth knowing on the band's profile page.

Seventeen years in, the reviews read less like discovery than like frustration on the band's behalf — Backes closed his by hoping the commercial success would finally turn up.

A new guitarist and a broken engine

The guitar chair has been the unstable one. Founding guitarist Simon Schweiger announced his departure on 28 January 2020 after fourteen years, marked by a video for Alone In The Dark from Enhancer that the band described as a thank-you; György Hoffmann stepped in. The chair has turned over again since, and the most recent change is the significant one: the guitarist who had held the job for five years has gone, replaced by Phill, 27, whose reference points are Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold rather than the band's older street-rock instincts. The band describe the handover as having gone amicably.

The rest of the line-up is stable and long-serving. Matthias Gaßner, a guitarist by training, has played bass since 2011. Julius Dollinger joined on drums in 2016 at nineteen and now makes his living entirely from music, teaching drums and piano between tours. Schuster, the founder, calls himself the quiet one in the band and is the source of its more introspective material.

Autumn 2026 brought a less glamorous development. The band's self-built tour bus suffered engine damage over a gig weekend, and they have been selling merchandise to cover the repair — a reminder of the scale this operates at, which is four people, one van, and no label tour support.

Where they stand, September 2026

The Rubicon touring cycle has now run for two years and has not stopped. The headline dates carried on into the spring: Balingen's Sonnenkeller, then the Künstlerhaus in Kempten on 6 March 2026, doors at eight and on stage at nine, an hour's drive from where the band grew up. In May they crossed into Switzerland for Flon in St Gallen on the 2nd with ATG, and returned for Rock am Weier on 12 June, on a bill with Phenomden & The Scrucialists.

The summer was festivals: Rock am Schilf in Leutkirch and Harry's Full Metal Party in Freudenstadt over the first weekend of July, then a club show at Marias Ballroom in Hamburg on 29 August. Two dates remain on the books for this year — the Ponyhof in Frankfurt on 7 October and the Alte Kaserne in Landshut on 24 October.

Their own count stands at more than 550 concerts, and the pitch they make is deliberately unfashionable: rock and metal with no click track, no filters and no backing tracks. No new record has been announced, though the band say more shows and festivals are planned beyond this run.