Home

The notion of home isn’t precise, even a dictionary will offer multiple definitions. A home can be a place where you live, a place where you belong, where you originate from or a place where you’re given care; it can be a physical space, a land, a people or even a person. The concept isn’t completely universal, but everyone possesses a unique idea of what home means to them. On her fifth album, Ziúr considers not just what home symbolizes from her perspective, but the word’s resonance to the diverse community that surrounds her, and how their stories have impacted her over the years. Indeed, it’s the first time she’s felt it necessary to examine her own nationality. In the past, she’s deliberately avoided labelling herself as German, feeling disconnected from her country’s politics, culture and even the German language itself. In 2025, the idea of Germanness is in flux and progressives are under attack from all sides. The country’s politics aren’t only being turned inward by the growing throng of far-right voices, but by scared moderates, opportunists and those blinded by comfort, willing to ignore hatred to maintain their privilege. Stepping up to provide a different narrative, Ziúr scours her soul, writing and singing in German for the first time and proposing growth and evolution, not fear and regression. “I never considered being part of Germany,” she explains. “But I am.”

A solemn mood permeates the album’s opening track ‘Brown is the Color’, and Ziúr sings in measured, slow-motion breaths over noisy synth oscillations and doomed piano flourishes. Already, it’s a significant departure from her last run of releases, veering away from the frenetic, satirical chaos of 2023’s Hakuna Kulala-released Eyeroll or its fantastical, dubby predecessor Antifate. Ziúr pulls on real world insights here, tracing her oldest, dearest musical inspirations to present her origins to anybody who might be listening. “Cold world is holding up,” she laments with a metallic crunch. “To let go of your heart, let me go.” And her voice emerges from the shadows completely on ‘Tame’; unprocessed, Ziúr sounds naked and vulnerable on ‘Tame’, curving her precise words around broken, lopsided rhythms and jangling new wave guitars. It’s pop music in its own way, inverted and reconstructed to fit snugly into her well-established sonic landscape. On ‘No Yawn’, brittle, downsampled hi-hats and industrial scrapes ping-pong around distorted riffs, provided by James Ó Ceallaigh aka WIFE; “You fail to sugarcoat your half-ass attempt,” she deadpans, “to build your promised wonderland on quicksand.” Even the beatless ‘All Odds No Chants’, a collaboration with Elvin Brandhi and Sara Persico, reveals another room in Ziúr’s autobiographical suite, mirroring György Ligeti’s enduringly influential choral works with its gnarled, dissonant vocal harmonies.

The key to Home, though, lies underneath the album’s central track, the first Ziúr has written in German. ‘Im Bann Der Wehenden Fahnen’ (in the spell of flags waving) directly tackles the country’s muddled political landscape – its complex history and its dangerously hypocritical present. “ne Geschichte die ohne Herz beginnt,” (a story that begins with no heart) she opens. “dessen strömendes Blut unweigerlich abwärts rinnt” (whose streaming blood runs unstoppably backwards). We know exactly what she’s talking about as Ziúr recounts a bleak repetition of events, pairing her words with bar room piano chords and jazzy drums that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Notwist record: “Wenn die Moral der Geschichte geschickt kaschiert wird wird in der Gunst der Stunde Wort für Wort neu etikettiert” (when the story’s moral, so neatly concealed, meets its moment to be relabeled word for word). It’s refreshing to hear such confident, poetic German words, and Ziúr sounds free-er than ever before examining her uncomfortable relationship with Germany in her native tongue. And this openness carries the whole record, whether she’s crying harsh truths over damaged orchestral scrapes on the album’s goth-y title track, or duetting with Manchester’s Iceboy Violet on ‘Through the Trees’. On the former, Ziúr’s voice soars, echoing hypnotically over unsettling analog distortions and gnarled strings. It’s one of the eeriest and most beautiful tracks she’s penned, camouflaging its broken electronics with ghostly moans and theatrical punctuations.

By inviting in her own demons, Ziúr has been able to write her most personal album. Her relationship with home will always be thorny, but through music, she’s been able to create a place to exist that’s truly comfortable and protective. “We readjust,” she says. “We build our own home.”