Rammstein have unveiled a new video for Angst ('Fear'), the third single to be taken from brand new, eighth studio album Zeit, which was released today.
In no surprise to anyone who's paid attention to Rammstein for more than ten minutes, the (mostly) black and white video for Angst features some unforgettable and straight-up bizarre visuals, including dancing cheerleaders, masked percussionists, Till Lindemann in mad facepaint tied to a strecther and the band themselves in identical suburban dad clothes with slicked back hair with individual TVs in the background. Did we mention that they shoot up the TVs with guns given to them by the cheerleaders? No. Well, we’ve told you now.
If you're wondering exactly what the hell the song itself is about, fret not: we got Oxford Professor of Modern German Literature Karen Leeder to give us a track-by-track guide to Zeit earlier in the week. Here's what she had to say about Angst:
"The starting point is the family, the father threatening the naughty child with the ‘black man’, or bogey man. But we soon see countries and peoples arming themselves against what they don’t understand and thus fear. A powerful chorus challenges idle scapegoating: ‘Who is afraid of the bogey man?’.
The song has its roots in an eighteenth-century German playground game, Black Man, a game bound up in folklore and plague history, and there are more hints of Goethe’s famous ‘Erlkönig’ (‘King of the Elves’) poem, in which a goblin comes to steal a child as the incarnation of fear. But with the householders locking themselves away, we certainly here warnings about COVID and Fortress Europe."
So there you go, then. Rammstein surprised the metal scene last month by revealing that they were releasing a brand new album merely three years after the release of their self-titled opus, which itself emerged a decade after 2009's Liebe ist für alle da.
In the latest issue of Metal Hammer, we take a deep dive into the new record - pick up the magazine now across the UK or right here.
Watch the video for Angst below:
