German post-rock/experimental youngbloods There’s A Light unveiled their second album and the first one with Napalm Records, f̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶I ̶h̶o̶pe̶? for what must we hope? on December 10, 2021. Rooted in the post-rock scene, their music combines powerful and resolute guitar lines and audacious melodies with elements from the ambient genre, occasionally adding emotional vocals to some of the album’s eleven flawless songs. Here’s our interview with the band’s founder & guitarist, David Christmann.

Beginnings:

We all were friends before, but actually, we started out as a studio project by me and Jonas Obermüller (keys/synths). I formed the project with him when my best friend died in a car accident and music helped me a lot to get through these dark times.

Andreas Richau (vocals/bass) later joined after I asked him spontaneously when we got the chance to hit the studio for our first EP which was kind of improvised in one weekend. Later on, Jonas had to move to a different location where we couldn’t jam much anymore sadly. Jan Lüftner (drums) and Markus Dold (guitar) got in touch with me after our first EP because they liked what we did and we jammed a lot for fun and I thought it’s a cool idea to go ahead and make “There’s A Light” not only a project but a band.

Behind the name:

Since music helped me a lot to get through these desperate times I thought the name “There’s A Light” couldn’t be any better since it gave me so much hope after the passing of my best friend, although it sounds a bit cliche. (laughs)

Inspiration:

Well, I can only speak for me, but we all listen to a lot of different music reaching from metal to pop to ambient to folk and a lot of other stuff!

I’m a huge Radiohead fan, “In Rainbows” is my number one album of all time! (laughs)

Other things which inspire us are all the things we went or will go through in this life: was or will it be a happy, sad, desperate, lucky or hopeful moment.

I – for example – think I write better music when I’m really sad or desperate. (laughs)

Teamwork:

That varies a lot. I often like to loop or create little sketches for myself in my bedroom studio, then we hit the rehearsal room and jam to it for example. Other times we just start to jam and something great comes out, or we just sit on the computer and record different stuff together and see what happens.

The inspiration behind “f̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶I ̶h̶o̶pe̶? for what must we hope?“:

What inspired me the most, was to think of hope not only as something good but also something which can really be intimidating.
Hope can be something so precious, but also dangerous to fall down into a rabbit hole when you got the wrong expectations about things.
In general, working on new music and trying out new ways to record ourselves in our studios was super fun and very instructive, and probably curative for every one of us.

COVID-19:

We had to postpone our release due to COVID-19 from late summer to December. Also, we had to find a way to record our music without meeting face to face with everyone, so we recorded guitars in my home studio, bass, and vocals separately in Jan’s home studio, drums in Frankfurt in the B9 Studios, synths at Jonas’ home studio. We shared the sessions through a cloud, so we can all work on the songs together.

Fun facts:

When we were touring China we later went to Hong Kong to have some days off. A taxi driver almost killed us all because he fell asleep in a long curve and drove on the opposite lane. We woke him up really quickly and he went back on our lane as though nothing had happened. (laughs) That was really scary at the moment, now I can laugh about it though!