Malik Harris: The next coup of the German ESC participant – Munich

who cosby Visiting their studio complex for the first time might be wondering: Why is there half a bedroom set up in the middle of the lounge where the band gathers for vegan brunch every day, with a made-up queen-size bed, bedside tables, mirror and so on? Is it now being rented here on Airbnb to fill the band’s coffers? Those who know the hosts better might think they simply wanted to make things more comfortable for themselves and their guests, and you know how many nights the musicians stayed here.

So did her protégé Malik Harris, now more famous than Cosby himself. He fell asleep after singer Marie Kobylka heard him sing in a bar and was invited to the studio for months on the couch. It didn’t hurt him, especially working with his manager, Robin Karow, songwriter of Cosby. Together they conquered the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, well, Harris ended up in last place, but he has always credibly marketed the national defeat as a personal triumph.

Nine months later, people would have liked to talk to him about it in the Unterföhring studio. But Harris has to apologize because of a cold. He was so badly hit that shortly before he almost canceled the last performance of the year at home in Landsberg. But he pulled through, and when the voice cracked, the fans took over the singing part. Now he’s finally in bed, in his own home, and on the phone he says: “The lying flat comes at the right time.” Not being able to do anything for a few days, that didn’t happen all year, there was always action.

Now he has the peace to review everything, going through the pictures and videos of the past few months. The ESC opening party in the castle in Turin, surrounded by artists from all over the world, “awesome”, he’ll tell his grandchildren about that; the performance including the message of peace in Ukraine in the Grand Prix final, where he noticed that despite the serious song “Rockstars” he had to keep smiling because he was aware of the message of his contribution – “Be in the here and now” – the whole time was: “How cool is that, you can sing in front of 100 million people!” The fact that he was last is “still a mystery”, but in the end it turned out to be “a blessing”. “The loser gets a lot of action again.”

But you could also say that a strong song got the attention it deserved and a super-charming singer-songwriter used the platform. Harris then went on tour with Amy McDonald, playing festivals and solo shows to thousands of people. In fact, “Rockstars” was one of the most successful songs of the ESC 2022 in terms of streams (2.5 million on Youtube), so much so that Harris was able to re-release his 2021 album “Anonymous Colonist” as a “Rockstar Edition”. So much so, however, that the follow-up single “You and I” was lost. All the more he now relies on his next thing in January.

And with the single “Dreames” we are back in the Unterfoehringen studio bedroom, because this was created especially for the video. Pro filmmakers Karow and Kobylka, who shot it, show it off quite proudly on a laptop. It’s about feminism, empowerment. Young women break through social and family resistance to Malik’s urgent singing and clever rap parts; then the music stops and you see a teenage couple kissing in an American sled, see the guy’s hand slide lower, hear her “no!” say, sees him keep going – until surprisingly she colds him; at the end, hundreds of liberated women run across a vast field. You don’t notice that it’s the Murnauer Moos, you think more of America’s vastness, just like everything has an international format. “We try hard,” says Kobylka, “that suits an English-speaking artist better.”

Cosby want to catapult themselves into the future with memories of the Eighties

But that suits Cosby better too. Like no other band from Munich, from Bavaria, they radiate international sexiness with their look and sound. The South By South West Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, the most important showcase festival in the world, announced them at their three appearances there this year as one of the most promising indie bands from Germany, which even after ten million streams on Spotify “still believes in a better world, better tomorrow, better pop songs”. In the video for the title track of the new album “Calling Out” they pose in front of and in a Delorean, the time machine from the teen film “Back to the Future”, and with this past, the Eighties, they wanted to catapult themselves into the future .

The synth pop in “Spaceship”, “Nightfall” or “Saviour” sounds like their own soundtrack for the retro mystery Netflix series “Stranger Things”, completely up-to-date from a pool of legendary sound treasures by “Major Tom” twisted together to “Thriller”. Dave Bucherl, her old friend and new drummer, thumps a set from the pioneering days of electronic drums; Kilian Reischl was allowed to wear a magnum mustache and let off steam in “Maniac”-like electric guitar solos; and Marie Kobylka even makes a sparkling appearance of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. Very sexy, fun, effective, hip – but for the bands themselves it’s long gone.

“The old album, i.e. the current one, is scattered,” says Marie Kobylka; Robin Karow describes it as a “closed chapter”, “mentally we are already somewhere else”. What band would talk about their latest work like that? One that pushes forward, that sits together every day, talks, questions itself. They were “full of question marks” when the album was made, in the two years of the pandemic. Traveling and playing, they would have found themselves and their destination again: in Sweden, on Iceland, in the music bars of New Orleans, and especially at the SXSW festival.

You are already in the middle of the next album

In the club Ether’s Follies they took after the Canadian band elevator on. Cosby played “like a high-performance Tesla”, and the others like the exact opposite, like a band that reaches the next gig in the other city with the last drop of petrol in the tank, but then starts all the more uninhibited. “We followed them like fans from club to club. They reminded us of us before, and through them we rediscovered our love for music,” says Karow.

You’re already in the middle of the next album, which shouldn’t sound like tracks, but like songs, not like plug-ins, but like plugged-in instruments. They play “Here I Am”, for Kobylka “the song that will change everything”, and you feel more than you understand what they mean. The video with lots of tulle and tears makes you think of Billy Eilish, Lana Del Rey and Christmas, but above all you hear more real heart again. This should be reflected in all the songs on the new record, which is supposed to develop as an organism as a whole, fully decelerated. Not as individual sound bites or pop slogans, with which you just have to create hype on hysterical media platforms like Tiktok or Spotify.

Melli Alder sits on the couch next to the four musicians and listens carefully. According to a tip, she is the new girl in the artist collective. Like Marie Kobylka or Malik Harris, she auditioned here in the studio. Her voice trembled, says the 18-year-old, so very different from this mysterious, overwhelming organ in her hundreds of home video cover versions on Tiktok, which her 21,000 followers greeted with “crass!”, “goosebumps” or “Hast you a contract?” Leave a Comment.

She now sings some of them against the backdrop of the studio bedroom (she painted the walls). From here we should continue. She writes songs with Kobylka like an older sister, Karow builds her career plan: First on tour with Cosby, he says. And then to the ESC? “Let’s see. One possibility out of thousands,” says Karow. Malik Harris agrees, and if he has one tip, it’s this: “You have to come up with a song that you’re 100 percent behind, then you don’t care about the result.”

Cosby, Thursday, Feb. 23, 8 p.m., Munich, Muffatwerk, Ampere