NAKED LUNCH – Songs For The Exhausted

The year is 2000. After only ten years performing and recording, the Austrian group Naked Lunch had reached the end of the line. They had experienced a meteoric rise throughout the 1990s: less than four years had seen the group move from a mold-infested rehearsal room in an Austrian town to a five-star hotel on Times Square. Imagine endless tours, outrageously expensive recordings in studios from Bochum to New York, an extended stay in London and collapsed major-label deals – imagine, essentially, what the band themselves called “an utterly pointless burning through money”. Eventually, the group returned to their hometown. What remained were mostly disillusioning experiences in the pop business and a huge amount of debt. Most of us would probably have thrown in the towel at that point. Alas, these men did not. Having grown into a quartet, the band decided to hit the reset button and start over. Together with producer and friend Olaf Opal (including work with The Notwist, International Music, etc.), they barricaded themselves for almost three years in the newly built studio of bassist Herwig Zamernik to work on an album that would eventually be released in 2004 under the name SONGS FOR THE EXHAUSTED. “The recordings were shameless, insanely intense, exhausting, and at times even disturbing. At the same time, all that long work was also somewhat cleansing and rewarding. Rewarding in the sense that they allowed us to return to a ‘to hell with what others think’ attitude. We were able to create freely again. That’s how this record emerged, and for us it meant a new beginning, a turning point – or rather a kind of rebirth.” (Oliver Welter) SONGS FOR THE EXHAUSTED became not only a milestone in the band’s career. It was also, in a way, a farewell to an unrestrained era and an admission of the exhaustion that resulted from it. The album certainly isn’t easy fare. The record is dark, at times even obstructive. Yet it has the ability to embrace us and, as Anja Plaschg alias Soap&Skin once put it, “to comfort us in feverish nights.” SONGS FOR THE EXHAUSTED was – and remains even today – “a masterpiece once thought impossible!” (Austria’s Der Standard, 2004)