The Imperial Mustard

September 2011, and a name taken from a dead mustard brand

The Imperial Mustard came together in Frankfurt am Main in September 2011, assembled from the remains of a previous band called Nova Drive. In an interview published in May 2022 the members described that first incarnation as an instrumental jam group; the singer Suse Michel and the guitarist Eick Hoemann joined afterwards. The name came out of Hoemann's side ventures and refers to a mustard brand that no longer exists, attached to a joke about what one adds to cabbage.

None of the five arrived without history. Hank Wagner had played guitar in C/NO, Too Rude, The Burning Rubberdolls, Smiles in Boxes, Bob Lyng and Nova Drive. Michel started out in the punk band Godex, then C/NO and The Infected Virgins, and still drums for and writes for The Slags, an all-female Frankfurt group that had been running for more than three decades by the time of that interview. Carsten Eckermann has played bass since he was sixteen, in Gravity Sucks, Sonderfeld and Lore, where he sang. Stefan Myschor overlapped with Wagner in Too Rude and The Burning Rubberdolls, and has also worked with Cosmic Twins and Wolf Schubert K. & Friends. The arrival of Gene Deja on second guitar produced the current line-up and, with it, the two records the band are willing to stand behind.

Everything is a first take

The working method is unusually strict for a band whose music sounds loose. Nothing is composed in advance. The five play in their rehearsal room, which doubles as their studio, with the multitrack running, and afterwards listen back through the sessions and choose takes together. Michel explained in 2022 that the pieces emerge without a safety net, and that the band treat any attempt to decide beforehand what should appear as a guarantee that it will go wrong. Tracks routinely run between seven and twelve minutes because, on their account, a groove needs that long to take hold.

During the pandemic they kept recording rather than stopping, accumulating roughly two hours of material, from which Wagner and Eckermann assembled twenty-two rough mixes. Eckermann has been blunt about the band's earlier output: he told DPRP that the rough-mixed, made-on-the-spot jam albums the original line-up put on Bandcamp and sold as homemade copies at shows were never promoted, and that the band do not count them as releases at all. Proper multitrack mixing is what separates the current era from that one.

Room One, then Turn the Stone

Room One, released on 3 March 2023 and recorded at Semolina Studios, carries the sleeve note "All tracks improvised, no overdubs!" Wagner and Eckermann engineered and mixed it; Mark Pfurdtscheller mastered it at Chin Chat Studio in Limburg. Nine tracks run from the 3:52 of "Everything's Allright" to the 12:10 closer "Windy Crater", and the CD came out in a limited digisleeve edition. The artwork, as on everything since, was designed by Soheyl Nassary of EYETM.

The second album, Turn the Stone, appeared on 5 December 2025 through SLAGrec, running 64:08 across nine tracks. Wagner and Eckermann recorded and mixed it at a studio the credits call NextToGerard, with the band producing. The Bandcamp note is characteristic: all tracks improvised and recorded on the spot, as received from the universe. "Black Sunday" opens at 5:46, "Beautiful Day" stretches to 11:50, and the instrumental "Orient V8" holds a single pulse for 9:25 before "Goodbye" closes at 6:15. The band previewed the record at the Psychedelic Network Festival at Café Cairo in Würzburg on 29 November 2025 and held the release party at KJK Offenbach on 12 December 2025.

What the reviews found in it

Michael Haifl gave Turn the Stone eight out of ten at SaitenKult on 28 December 2025, filing it under Neo Kraut and arguing that the band demonstrate how freely improvised music can still be purposeful. He heard the opening as harsh, jazzy and charged with suppressed anger, the instrumental centrepiece as monotone by design and carried by insistent bass, and the closing track as a melancholic resolution. His advice was to give the album time rather than sample it.

Jerry Kranitz reviewed it for DPRP on 22 February 2026 and described a band balancing free-form jamming against something closer to songwriting. He singled out the grinding guitar tone on "On The Line", the way the title track moves between spacious atmosphere and acid drone, and "Beautiful Day" as an open exploratory jam, with Michel's vocals sitting somewhere in the lineage of West Coast psychedelia.

Metalglory scored it 7.25 out of ten on 22 March 2026. That review is useful on how the group is put together: Michel functions inside the mix rather than as a front figure, repetition does the compositional work, and tension is generated by small shifts in guitar accent, drum pattern and reverb rather than by hooks. Its central judgement is that the record is not a polished imitation of an older style but something built deliberately by five people in a room.

Where they stand in autumn 2026

The summer just past was the busiest stretch of festival work the band have had. They played the Burg Herzberg Festival on 1 August 2026, on the Höllenschuppen stage — a site they know well, having appeared there several times, once on the main stage in the Nova Drive era. On 29 August 2026 they took the hangar stage at the Musikschutzgebiet festival in Homberg (Efze) at 11:45 in the morning, and the following day, 30 August, played the Feinstaubbühne at the Museumsuferfest in Frankfurt, on the riverbank by the Eiserner Steg. Booking runs through the Frankfurt agency slagoffice.frankfurt, which also lists the band's influences plainly: the Velvet Underground, Neu!, Can, Captain Beefheart, the Patti Smith Group, Neil Young & Crazy Horse and PJ Harvey.

Alongside their own material the group have long been part of the annual cover-song nights at Frankfurt's Batschkapp, playing programmes devoted to The Who, The Doors, Depeche Mode and Woodstock. That work sits oddly next to a repertoire nobody wrote down, but it explains some of the ease with which the five hand a song around on stage.

What comes next is a single club date rather than a tour: Ponyhof in Frankfurt on 2 October 2026, with the Cologne trio You Guitarprayer. It is a homecoming of sorts to a room they played in April 2022, when the bill cost eight euros on the door and the support came from another local psychedelic band, The Black Cat's Eye.