Turn my heart to stone
Turn the sun away
Feeling no desire
Feeling no more pain
The phrase “cold-hearted” usually lands as an accusation, a verdict passed on someone who has withheld affection or placed too much distance between themselves and the world. Yet emotional exhaustion can make that same coldness sound almost merciful. When every thought presses too hard, and every feeling remains exposed, numbness begins to resemble some sort of shelter: a private fantasy in which the heart can be hardened before anything else reaches it.
Berlin post-punk quartet Agatha is Dead! enters that conflicted, icy state with “Cold-Hearted,” a collaboration with fellow Berlin artist SCHRAMM. The song’s accompanying video places both singers inside the crush of a darkened dance floor while the lyrics move between emotional exposure and the desire to feel nothing at all.
The fourth and penultimate single taken from Agatha is Dead!’s forthcoming debut album, Concrete, due September 11 via Duchess Box Records, “Cold-Hearted” follows the disorientation of the previous single, “Strangers,” with a more physical and immediate form of unease. Deep bass moves beneath sheets of atmospheric synth before a cold, zigzagging gothic-rock guitar figure cuts across the arrangement. Its sharp repetition gives the song an instant hook, while the drums maintain a steady dance-floor pressure, quaking underneath.
SCHRAMM takes the opening verse, delivering the words in a cool, velvety register that remains controlled even as the lyrics ask to be torn open and examined. The request is intimate and invasive at once: peel back the lies, expose what has been hidden, and keep the heart warm before it freezes beyond recovery. When Agatha is Dead!’s Lilly enters, her voice initially gathers beneath SCHRAMM’s before taking command of the chorus with “Turn my heart to stone” and “leave it all behind,” lines that launch the track into its dark dance groove.
The second verse reverses the exchange. Lilly explains that she has already tried to open the other person and now fears that the same scrutiny will be turned upon her. Each singer recognizes a version of themselves in the other: guarded, capable of cruelty, and frightened by whatever might remain beneath their practiced distance. The chorus turns that mutual fear into a fantasy of emotional anesthesia, with stone offering protection at the cost of love, desire, and pain alike.
In the accompanying video, SCHRAMM first appears as a solitary figure in a white shirt and black tie, nearly reduced to silhouette by a fierce light at the rear of a crowded, fog-filled room. Dancers continually cross between the singer and the camera, concealing faces and breaking bodies into fragments. Close framing, motion blur, and ghosted double images make the room feel unstable, as though the party were being recalled through a memory already beginning to fail.
As Lilly enters the song, the camera finds the two singers pressed together among the crowd. Their faces overlap in tight close-ups while hands, shoulders, and passing figures close around them. White backlight gradually gives way to deep blue, and the dancers’ movements grow less social than compulsive. The room offers physical contact everywhere, though little genuine comfort, turning the party into an apt setting for two people who want to be understood while recoiling from what such understanding might reveal.
In the video’s final third, the crowd disappears, and Lilly stands alone beneath a narrow column of white light, her arms held behind her back and her white blouse creased tightly across her body. Her rigid posture gives the chorus’s transformation into stone a physical form. For several long moments, the movement that has filled the room is suspended, leaving her isolated in darkness as the refrain circles through its promises of emptiness.
When the dance floor returns, it does so in a rush of blue and pale pink light. Lilly is absorbed once more into the surrounding bodies, singing and moving as the camera is jostled through the crowd. The release is temporary and deliberately ambiguous: the party provides motion, proximity, and escape, while the final backlit silhouettes leave the deeper question unresolved. The heart may survive by turning cold, but survival of that kind carries its own loneliness.
Watch the video for “Cold-Hearted” below:
Formed during the long winter of 2021, Agatha is Dead! began as a collaboration between Lilly and Noah, who developed their earliest songs in isolation before bringing them into the rehearsal room. Drawing from the emotional severity of Joy Division and the nocturnal romanticism of The Cure, the band balance melodic economy with mounting intensity. Joined by Joey Ramone Hansen on drums and Arthur on bass, the group soon established itself within Berlin’s live circuit.
Since signing to Duchess Box Records in 2025, Agatha is Dead! have played a series of sold-out headline shows, including a Berlin appearance at Lido that reached capacity months in advance. In March 2026, the band traveled to the United States for SXSW, introducing their music to a wider international audience. That rapid ascent has established Agatha is Dead! as one of the most exciting new bands in the international post-punk scene and one of the finest groups Berlin has produced in more than a decade. Their selection for the Wunderkinder program at this year’s Reeperbahn Festival further confirms the growing attention surrounding them.
SCHRAMM is the project of Berlin-based musician, photographer, and filmmaker Arne Schramm. Since releasing the debut EP I Made This for Myself (I Didn’t Make It for You) in 2022, SCHRAMM has developed a mixture of post-punk, new wave, and wiry UK indie rock, moving between German and English lyrics. The project’s latest EP, Something Smelling Funny, was released in February 2026.
Agatha is Dead! will celebrate the release of Concrete with a special album-launch performance at Rough Trade Berlin on September 11. Further appearances at Reeperbahn Festival and Waves Vienna will lead into an October European tour, followed by another run of German dates in February 2027.
Agatha is Dead! Tour Dates 2026
7 August — Bergfunk Open Air, Königs Wusterhausen
11 September — Rough Trade Berlin
13 September — BLOW Festival, Frankfurt
16 September — Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg
1–3 October — Waves Festival, Vienna
8 October — Café Glocksee, Hannover
9 October — Naumanns Tanzlokal, Leipzig
10 October — Nürnberg Pop at Club Stereo
11 October — Engelsburg, Erfurt
13 October — Bumann & Sohn, Cologne
14 October — Schon Schön, Mainz
15 October — Substanz, Munich
16 October — B72, Vienna
Agatha is Dead! Tour Dates 2027
18 February — KFZ, Marburg
19 February — Lagerhaus, Bremen
20 February — Die Trompete, Bochum
21 February — Molotow, Hamburg
23 February — Franz K, Reutlingen
24 February — Groove Station, Dresden
25 February — SO36, Berlin
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