Photo: George Tatakis
Markus Reinhardt, the founder of Echo Award-winning, Gold & Platinum-selling Wolfsheim, presents his most personal, authentic work to date entitled Waking Up In A Different World, from his new project Renard. The album was released today by Metropolis Records on all formats including CD, vinyl, and through all digital and streaming platforms. The album features collaborations with a dazzling roster of musicians and vocalists. The second video from Renard’s new album is for the song Hotel, featuring the incomparable Marian Gold of the band Alphaville.
The emotional, psychological journey inward presented in the track and its video is at once both detached and passionate, with Gold’s emotional backing howl. There is a slight familiarity to the track, but there is a freshness; a 21st-century melancholy, perhaps a rumination on impossible travel. For the musician, the hotel can be a refuge, a sanctuary, the home of a one night stand, and on particularly long tours, a movable prison. As the concept of “hotel” is visited in the lyrics, Reinhardt reflects upon his own personal changes.
“The end of Wolfsheim motivated me to reinvent myself,” says Reinhardt. “A process that was urgently needed. With Renard, I’m more with myself. My album combines the sound & mood of the 80s with the stylistic devices of today.”
Reinhardt and Gold share a mutual admiration of each other’s work, and for Gold, singing for any act other than an Alphaville is “an extraordinary occasion.” Gold appears on another track on the album, Damn Happy.
The accompanying animated video for Hotel, directed by Babis Alexiadis (with Tatiana Eikosidyou, and Polyxeny Katsari) features dancer Nikos Kalivas and performers Thanasis Alexiadis, Virginia Tamvaki, Cleopatre Balai, and Caterina Sisinni. It is a dizzying, dreamlike spiral into the mind and heart of the song’s protagonist, beautifully considered, with striking imagery.
Waking Up in a Different World is out now via Metropolis Records
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