Brutalismus 3000 Dreamt in American
The duo’s aggressive new album ‘Harmony’ turns anxiety, contradiction, and collective release into something refreshingly hopeful.
- Written by: Amanda Breeze
- Photography by: Tom Funk
For a band whose music is often described as aggressive, Brutalismus 3000 often return to the idea of protection. Not protection in the conventional sense, like security systems, self-help mantras, or the illusion of control that fills so much of contemporary life. For the Berlin duo Victoria Vassiliki Daldas and Theo Zeitner, the idea of protection appears in the way they speak about friendship, making music together, and the people who travel across countries to see them perform. It appears in Harmony, their second studio album, where anxiety, love, paranoia, optimism, and destruction occupy the same space without competing for dominance.
Over the last few years, Brutalismus 3000 have become one of electronic music’s most recognizable acts. Their crowds stretch far beyond the scenes that first embraced them, gathering in festival fields, warehouses, and clubs from Los Angeles to Tokyo. At any show, people are just as likely to be moshing, headbanging, and doing the hakken as they are standing completely still waiting for the next drop. The uniforms vary by city, but the intensity remains the same.
Harmony arrives after two years of obsessive work, resulting in a record shaped by what Theo calls “the anxious blast of times that we’re living in.” Political instability has become routine. The Internet has evolved into a permanent feedback loop of outrage, distraction, and performance. Technology continues to move faster than society’s ability to make sense of it. For younger generations in particular, this instability feels less like something to fear. As Victoria puts it, “they were born with it, they had no chance of avoiding it because they were just thrown into it all.”
Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, Harmony sits inside them. The album moves through techno, punk, trap, dubstep, nu-metal, and hyperpop without settling into any one language for too long. “This was the first time we didn’t try to bring it back to club music,” Theo explains. Much like their audience, the record refuses to belong to a single scene. Contradiction is treated less like a problem than a fact of life, allowing aggression and tenderness, humor and dread, to occupy the same space. The idea of harmony itself followed a similar trajectory, starting as an ironic gesture similar to the “toxic positivity” affirmations that once opened their live sets before gradually becoming something genuine as the album took shape. By the end of the process, the record had come to encompass everything from artistic freedom to collaboration, friendship, and “big fucking love and harmony.”
Amanda Breeze
Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, Theo Zeitner
Let’s talk about Harmony. How are you feeling?
VVD: We’ve worked on the album for two years. So we anticipated the release for so long.
TZ: Going to sleep without the album being released was horrible, I just wanted it to be out. People have no idea the work we’ve been losing our minds over the last years.
Especially with all the listening parties you hosted before the release. Such a tease!
TZ: Exactly. We showed it for the first time at our listening party in Tokyo, which was actually insane. There was such a crazy reaction from the crowd, it was really good.
VVD: It took a little bit of the anxiety away. [laughs]
I listened to the album quite a bit already and it feels like a record that’s trying to make sense of a lot of competing forces at the same time. Was there an idea you kept returning to while making it?
TZ: Not really. This was the first time we didn’t try to bring it back to club music. So there was never a moment where we said something like, “Oh fuck, there’s a four-to-the-floor part.” This is the first time we truly dared to be completely free from any boundaries.
VVD: We didn’t have any red line to follow. We just threw all our ideas out first and found our direction later. That was the process—a very chaotic but nice process.
Your music is inherently political. I wanted to touch on the period of instability we’ve all been living in. Do you think we’re adapting to chaos, or just getting better at pretending to be comfortable with it?
TZ: Adapting to the chaos is definitely what we’re doing. Harmony feels like a record that is really of its time. It’s very American in its topics, especially because we spent a lot of time there. We kind of dreamt in American, I would say.
VVD: Some of the references we make are more North American, for sure. But it also applies to everywhere in general.
TZ: There’s always been this feeling of general anxiety going around, but I would say it gets worse as time goes by. Like before, our music had a political message but it was more straightforward, whereas this record has more of a chaotic and anxious blast that represents the time we’re living in.
VVD: But also you see some optimism coming back a little in the second half of the album.
I see a lot of people from younger generations look up to you guys. What do you think they understand about the current moment that older generations still refuse to see?
TZ: Sometimes I wish I could see inside the brain of someone who’s like 16 right now. It must be insane to not know a different world. But, I don’t know, maybe it was the same for other generations, like when our parents grew up.
VVD: We were just talking about the ‘90s optimism that people still had. There was a moment where we all felt like the world was getting better. Of course there was a lot of stuff still going on, but there was that optimism.
Yeah, it feels like we’re trying so hard to survive.
TZ: But we’re trying to make something out of it. I feel like art and music are the best thing you can do at this time. We’re still trying to make sense of things I would say, but it does get overwhelming for sure.
When Brutalismus 3000 first started, there was a sense of rejection in the music. A rejection of scenes, rules, expectations, gatekeepers. What do you feel most resistant towards now?
TZ: A big thing for this record was resisting AI. I truly fucking find it the worst thing on earth. It’s really the apocalyptic shit we’ve always learned about and seen in movies. It takes so much away from us, even art, which is the only thing humans still have after all of this nonsense. That’s the only thing just humans can do on this planet.
VVD: Exactly, like we did the album cover with our own hands.
TZ: Yeah, the album cover was very intentionally built by us. We built the bed, filled it with pig’s blood from the butcher. [laughs]
The album cover kind of reminded me of that scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street from 1984 where Johnny Depp gets sucked into the bed and blood rises to the ceiling. But less gruesome obviously.
TZ: Actually, I got the idea for the cover when I was watching something really stupid that was also an ‘80s horror movie called Slumber Party Massacre II. There was a dream sequence with a bed from above with the shape of a person on it, but no one was lying there. I thought it was such a sick idea and wanted to show Vicky, so I went through each frame of the movie and…noticed the scene never happened. [laughs] I think I fell asleep during the movie and dreamt it up myself. But yeah, it was all made by hand. Also the techno scene is the worst with using AI, it’s horrible.
VVD: Like all this humanoid DJ stuff.
TZ: Anti-human actually.
Harmony is an interesting title for a record that contains so much friction. Was there a moment when the title stopped feeling ironic and started feeling like something you were actually looking for?
TZ: That’s exactly what actually happened. In the beginning it was more of an ironic title, kind of like how we used affirmations at the beginning of our shows. It was the same idea, but we wanted to make it a hateful record, like a real toxic piece of shit, and so we wanted to call it Harmony and make the most unharmonious record on earth. But like you said, a year into making it, there were so many moments of light and beautiful experiences, like the sessions we had with Underworld, who have become good friends throughout this process.
VVD: The recording process in general was super harmonious, especially since we got to make music with friends. Of course, we draw from bad memories or political things that are happening in the world, but everything we do always comes from a good place.
And you always have a strong message. I can say first hand that you’re the most loveable humans. But what is it about aggression that communicates things that tenderness sometimes can’t?
VVD: I think for me it always had a fun part. Like when I was a kid I always went to punk concerts and listened to a lot of Limp Bizkit and The Prodigy. And now we’re actually supporting The Prodigy. For me, that aggression always had the most fun.
TZ: Of course you can make beautiful tender music, but it just never came to us. We have this very emotional, gut reflex of being aggressive in our music, it always came naturally. Also the movies we watch and reference are always pretty chaotic and aggressive in nature. Overstimulation is really nice for me, like a head massage.
Speaking of things that shape how people think and create, did you see the social media ban for kids under 16?
VVD: Ah, yes I saw that. It’s kind of how it was before, like I had a Nokia where I could only play the snake game, call, and send a text message for 19 cents.
TZ: And we came out just fine.
Something I really like about this record is that it embraces contradiction rather than resolving it. Chaos and harmony, violence and love. These things can exist at the same time. Have people become too obsessed with consistency from artists?
VVD: Absolutely. We even feel it at our shows, especially with the new album because there’s a lot of genre-crossing now. I think the reaction really depends on which country we’re in. Maybe some people just don’t get it or don’t know how to move to it yet. Because some parts they’re headbanging, but then there’s a drop and it changes.
Would you say this is the most free you’ve felt making music?
TZ: The whole process was so different. Like kind of having to learn to produce again, because if you learn like me, you learn one genre and that’s what you do. I’m not a classically trained musician, so I had to learn dubstep, trap, and even the punk elements that you hear at the beginning of the album with the drums. It was the first time where we really came close to who we want to be as artists.
VVD: And with all this genre-crossing that we’re doing, we’ve gone away from all the classic techno festivals and clubs. I think we feel more liberated now.
‘I Bring My Gun to the Function’ feels like a track that moves between innocence and threat. The video sees kids running around freely, playing with toy guns, but there’s also this dark undertone of needing to protect themselves. Tell me about the message behind it.
TZ: The mood of the track is having this guarded innocence against the war next door. “I bring my gun to the function” is a metaphor for bringing your shield everywhere. Like, be ready for action, be ready to defend yourself, there’s a war agenda at every party. It’s about us protecting each other from the world.
We touched on the album cover earlier, but I’m curious to know why you chose it for Harmony? It looks like two people praying.
TZ: I love that it looks like praying, but I also love that it’s a little ambiguous. The feeling of it really speaks to the record, it gives this impression that this is all that’s left of yourself.
VVD: Yeah, and feeling safe in your bed, in your own environment. We were thinking about the structure of a house and questioning the feeling each room gives, how you remember it, how you attach memories to it. Like your bedroom as a child, you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean the memories were right, but it always served as a safe space.
Yeah, you could hide away from all the craziness.
TZ: But then the craziness somehow gets through to you. Put the blood back to the bedroom!
What does harmony feel like to you guys right now?
TZ: I just bought a PlayStation 2 and some old games. We finally had some fucking down time so we played Jackass: The Game on a little TV. That was harmony for me.
VVD: We were just kicking some ass, destroying fences, driving golf carts until two in the morning. Collecting injuries!
If you had to put one sentence on a billboard for the next generation, what would it be?
TZ: It sounds super cliché but I hate when people take themselves super seriously. Like artists who are only artists and not human beings are the most annoying types of people you can meet. Like, I know you’re pretending, I know you can love for even just a second.
VVD: I would say “Shoutout to my gang, we could never get enough, so fucking tense, but never not in love.” Because everything is so fucking tense and wild, but we’re always in love, and never forget the fun.
Amanda Breeze is a writer based in London. Her work has appeared in SSENSE, Schön!, METAL, and SICKY.
- Written by: Amanda Breeze
- Photography by: Tom Funk
- Date: June 29, 2026
