Banish the zeitgeist back into the bottle with a scream, and then take a deep breath: Voodoo Beach reject flashy hypes and the perverse laws of platform capitalism. The Berlin four-piece ensemble play mystically infused post-punk, celebrate dystopian poetry, and indulge in pleasurable delays and distortions as echoes of a broken era. The guitars murmur through seemingly endless spaces, the drums ride restlessly into the evening sun, and singer Heike Marie Rädeker’s voice tells of the madness of these days, as in the song “Die Hand” (“the hand”): Translated into English, he sings, “Life on credit / And everyone joins in / Everything anthracite / The animals cry in the forest”. An honesty that can only be countered by a few things, for we have no utopias, but only dreams, at best. And so, the 2023 album “Wonderful Life” is also a double-edged inventory of the present – dark and noisy, but also empowering and highly melodic.