Bilderbuch's '∞+1' Is a Gleefully Overloaded Masterpiece of Austrian Art-Pop
The Sonic Breakdown
Four years after the acoustic-leaning Gelb ist das Feld, Bilderbuch have gone the other way entirely. Maurice Ernst calls ∞+1 a Trennungsalbum — a breakup album — and then buries the heartbreak under more production than a breakup can reasonably carry. SRF 3’s Schimun Krausz tallied the direction of travel: the album is “wieder elektronischer, tanzbarer, verzerrter, verworrener und abwechslungsreicher” — more electronic, more danceable, more distorted, more tangled, more varied. Ten tracks. Thirty-six minutes. No fat.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Simon Freidhöfer produced throughout with the band, Marco Kleebauer co-producing the back half; Pascal Chenard mixed almost all of it and Robin Schmidt mastered. The result is clubby without being sterile — the bottom end stays rubbery enough to swing.
The Spatial Dynamics: The album announces itself with damage. FluxFM’s Celina Riedl heard opener “Finstere Erleuchtung” pull the listener in “mit dreckigen, bewusst unperfekten Vocoder-Sounds” — with dirty, deliberately imperfect vocoder sounds. Tagesspiegel noted the synthesizer sounding an alarm with “einer schrill aufschreienden Sirene.” Autotune, absent last time, is back and unashamed.
Standout Performance
“Push Reality,” the one track that opens the doors to outsiders: Lukas König on synthesizer, Katrin Paucz on vocals, Kleebauer at the board. SRF 3 singled out “Unterwasser” elsewhere as a flat-out “Synthie-Gitarrenmonster” — synth-guitar monster — and that is the register the whole record operates in.
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Zoe Camp, writing it up for Bandcamp Daily, placed them between “the twitchy dance-punk of early LCD Soundsystem and Franz Ferdinand” and “the winking, maximalist art-pop of The 1975 or Foals,” then signed off: “Don’t miss out.”
🌈 Rolling Stone Germany’s Gunther Reinhardt called it “ein zappelndes, zuckendes, fiepsendes Meisterwerk” — a twitching, jerking, beeping masterpiece — and added that “selten haben sie das so gut hinbekommen”: rarely have they pulled it off this well.
🌈 Tagesspiegel went furthest, calling it “eine der besten Platten des Jahres.” plattentests.de gave it 8/10; radioeins and FluxFM both made it Album of the Week. The German-speaking press has been queuing up, and the record deserves the queue.