It feels like forever since I stood at the back of the music room of Bristol’s Crofters Lounge pub with (pardon my namedropping) Clara and Hanni ARXX, as we collectively fell under the spell of a feisty Irishwoman and a studious Dutchman who played their opening set like their lives depended on it. Fräulein made an instant and unforgettable impression on all three of us and I couldn’t wait to start telling the world about their music. Unfortunately, a certain pandemic hampered their progress for a while, but they came out of the other side of it with all musical guns blazing, gigging whenever and wherever they could – including playing a LOUD WOMEN Fest and several other shows for us, of course – and quickly building the fan following that they fully deserved. It was only going to be a matter of time before you could buy a Fräulein record, and that became easier to do once their stunning vinyl debut EP A Small Taste was released, just over two years ago. A second cassette/CD EP Pedestal followed a year later and now, to help you plan the soundtrack of your 2024 summer Joni Samuels and Karsten Van Der Tol bring you what they describe as a bigger EP – but what, with ten tracks, feels more like a full-length album, in Sink Or Swim.
Stemming from demo sessions with their chums Cosmorat, and prefaced this year by the release of three very fine singles in ‘Wait And See’, ‘Feels Like Flying’, and, most recently, ‘Pruning’. Sink Or Swim has none of the desperation that its title might subconsciously imply. It’s a confident and assured record that’s wholly representative of Fräulein 2024 – one that they proclaim to have “resulted in our live sound (being) captured with more energy than we’d ever heard”. Listening to it as a whole, it’s impossible to disagree. Other tracks on the set are every bit as good, but those singles – a couple of which you can reacquaint yourselves with below – should be all the incentive you need to invest.
Fräulein belongs to the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ school of music – they found their sound pretty quickly, and commendably have stuck with it. What you hear on stage, you also hear on their records with never more than a minimal amount of studio fairy dust on the final mix, giving their songs a little bit of sonic ambiance that brings out the quality of Joni’s voice and writing in a most positive way. If saying this makes it sound like they haven’t progressed, it’s not supposed to – they have progressed, of course, and matured as a band in the way that anyone who works as hard as they do should be expected to. But they know what Fräulein fans want, and that’s what they deliver. Long may that continue to be the case…
Despite being a step forward from their earlier releases, Sink Or Swim is not going to disappoint any fan who has been following Joni and Karsten for any length of time. It will also win them many new ones, who will hopefully then check out their excellent previous work. If you have not encountered Fräulein before and are looking for peer group comparisons, there are not many to make as they are largely unique in their presentation and execution. I suppose they are most like either their South London peers Scrounge or a musically darker ARXX, their thick sonic soup offering arresting counterpoints between Joni’s soulful and often feral wailing, underpinned by her murky, rumbly guitar rhythms – no extended solos here, people – and the barrage of complex time signatures and jagged polyrhythms coming from Karsten’s drum kit. The noise they make isn’t always melodic, but it’s always joyful and very definitely the product of two people mentally attuned to each other in every way and really digging what they are doing. It’s their innate musical telepathy that makes them such a great band, as well as great people.
Sink Or Swim is out now on Submarine Cat records. It’s a record you can buy in full knowledge that you will be playing it for years to come.
Joni and Karsten play LOUD WOMEN on the Introducing Stage at Rebellion Festival, 4 August in Blackpool.
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