Golden Apes interview: ‘The Sun Rises Only and Solely from the Dark’

There is a particular quality to the music of Golden Apes that makes it difficult to confine within the familiar vocabulary of gothic rock and post-punk. Melancholy, darkness and longing are certainly present, but they are rarely straightforward emotions. They shift, contradict one another and sometimes reveal entirely different meanings depending on the words, the arrangements or the smallest change in atmosphere. There is poetry in this ambiguity, and considerable musical sensitivity in the way the band allows it to unfold.

With their twelfth studio album, “The Sun Came Up Tremendously”, released on September 18, 2026, through Icy Cold Records, the Berlin musicians continue developing an artistic language that has become unmistakably their own. Peer Lebrecht’s resonant voice, the carefully layered guitar arrangements and the band’s characteristic interplay between melodic weight and atmospheric space form the foundation of a record whose beauty is inseparable from its emotional complexity.

I recently spoke with Peer Lebrecht for Side-Line about the new album and the artistic sensibility that continues to define Golden Apes.

Golden Apes interview

Karo: “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” feels very recognisably Golden Apes, but not in the sense of repeating an old formula. After twelve albums, how do you distinguish between continuity and self-imitation? At what point does a characteristic sound become an artistic language you can still expand rather than a set of habits you have to escape?

Peer: If you want me to be quite honest – I don’t distinguish at all.

I don’t even feel the need to think about things written back then when I deal with something new. I’m someone who easily closes a chapter when I reach the final full stop, and there are, honestly, Apes albums I haven’t listened to since they were released. I just don’t feel the need. It may sound strange, but the moment the music is out, it has left my personal space, the sphere of intimacy.

While working on an album, everything is somehow entwined with the time in which it was created – the music, the words, the feelings – conditional snapshots. And as time moves on, so do certain conditions, perceptions, thoughts, impressions… Listening to old songs feels a bit like reading the diary of a person you barely know. And maybe it’s exactly that. Sure, there are some memories you share and images that trigger your cortex, but sensations have shifted, points of view have changed… fragments of memories of a feeling.

I don’t deny that there might be colours and patterns that turn up now and then throughout the canon. In the end, it’s still the same head, but I don’t care because then they seem to be part of my musical language, my sonic vocabulary.

For me, the blank page is always set in the here and now. The current state is the developer – no knotted striving for innovation, no expectations, no genre or stylistic constraints. If I like an idea, I go with it, and there’s no no-go as long as your curiosity is hungry.

Karo: Light appears throughout the album, but it is never simply positive. In “The Light (Inside Us),” it is something already present within us; in “Radiation,” it becomes almost overwhelming; and in “Helion,” it arrives after wounds, shadows and exhaustion. Were you interested in destabilising the usual opposition between light as salvation and darkness as danger?

Peer: Maybe I was never really convinced of this strict opposite-things theory.

Yes, at first glance, light has quite a solid and positive reputation, but there’s something lurking in the shadows. (Sorry, I had to.)

I’ve always been in awe of light’s ability to reveal things. When lightning strikes, a lamp suddenly switched on in a dark room, illumination in your head… the exposure of things we sometimes never wanted to see. Truths, failures, atrocities… yourself…

Don’t get me wrong – I like light. With all its spectral colours, its grandeur and sense of fairness, but it’s merciless. It can blind you, it can hurt you, lead you astray and cast away the shadows, the shelters…

Maybe it’s a question of wavelength or just the angle of incidence, but for me, light has never been solely redeeming. “Fiat Lux” is not necessarily a consolation…

Karo: The title phrase appears in “Helion,” roughly in the middle of the record rather than at its conclusion. That changes how I read the album because the sunrise is followed by “Where the River Ran,” “Evelyn,” “Radiation,” “City Walls” and finally “Dreams (Gone By).” Was it important that illumination should occur inside the story rather than resolve it?

Peer: As you already mentioned – the sun and its light as a symbol or metaphor might have different interpretations within the individual songs and lyrics. It is, as so often, a question of context.

Let’s take the opener “Farewell.” Here, the sunrise is a measure of time, a kind of countdown, a trigger. In “Helion,” it serves more as a harbinger, an announcement of an unshakeable truth. “Milk & Poison” sees it blinding and hurting as palpable proof of a failure, and in “Where the River Ran,” it closes the curtain on a kind of dream-like state. (Whether that’s good or bad depends on how you perceive this dream.)

So in the end, there was no deliberately arranged sequence of functions for the motif of the sun, just its role as judge and executioner in a given situation. I couldn’t even say if there is a linear narrative on the album or a red thread… maybe just a silver lining…

Karo: Your lyrics repeatedly return to a very physical vocabulary: milk, poison, ashes, stone, water, fire, wounds, walls, gates, mirrors. Abstract emotions are almost always given material form. Is that something you consciously look for when writing, the moment when an emotion can be translated into an object, substance or landscape?

Peer: That’s a very interesting question. To answer it, let me briefly describe my way of writing.

When it comes to words, I’m not a messenger but see myself more as an observer. That means I don’t have to find proper ways of wrapping a certain message or statement in adequate syllables. I just describe what is reflected on inner surfaces, light mirrored and light absorbed… camera obscura in my head.

Maybe I need those objects because of their reflective qualities, because of their physical necessity. Who equips our dreams? Who tells our subconscious which archetypes are valid and which are not? Is the stone really a stone or just a tool to break the mirror?

I don’t look for objects. I try to remember them…

Karo: “Resistance” contains a particularly interesting sequence: “I am the enemy,” “I am the strategy,” “I am the remedy,” “I am the empathy.” The speaker seems to occupy conflicting positions within the same struggle. Is resistance on this album directed against something outside the self, or are you more interested in the ways we become simultaneously the source of our own damage and the means of surviving it?

Peer: I was thinking a lot about these words. While writing them and afterwards.

Which of these four conditions am I really? And how many of them can you be at the same time? And why not all?

I think it’s not anger about a state but a revolt against its limitations. Not resistance against an external system, but resistance against a final form. Against definition. Against the temptation to trade complexity for peace.

Half-damaged instead of neatly resolved.

Karo: In “City Walls,” the questions gradually move from “Where is my ambition?” and “Where is my desire?” toward “Where am I?” and finally “Who am I?” I find that progression fascinating because architecture begins to feel psychological. Do cities interest you as emotional structures, places we construct around ourselves but also internalise?

Peer: Isn’t it true that language constructs its own spaces? Walls of repetitions, gates through semantic shifts, interiors built from omission… where the self is not negotiated psychologically but cartographically. It’s not what I am, but where. Dislocated between inner condition and external geography.

Is a wall protecting or imprisoning? Does a gate promise shelter or a chance to escape? Or is it just a symbol of transition? What if all the cities, walls and gates are not places of salvation but engineered systems of survival?

Let’s not be misled by the colour white. It doesn’t have to mean purity. Maybe it’s just sterility.

Where am I?

It’s all the way we left…

Karo: “Dreams (Gone By)” turns dreams into dew, poison, milk and ashes, while the rest of the lyric repeatedly creates, worships, destroys and loses them. Do you see memory in a similar way, not as something fixed that we retrieve, but as something that changes its substance every time we return to it?

Peer: It’s their texture that makes memories so unpredictable. Their nature. Not only when it comes to our decision about what eventually finds its way into the storage room of our heads, but also what form it will take.

Memories can be so sheltering, so soothing and consoling. They can catch you and drop you gently onto a soft surface, warm waters… floating… or they can be seething and boiling, burn your flesh and cauterize your skin and thoughts.

Sometimes at the same time… without changing their dress.

“My memories – my silence… and I don’t mind the flames…”

Karo: Musically, one of the things I find distinctive about Golden Apes is the coexistence of considerable physical weight with something almost fragile. The guitars can be massive and the drums forceful, yet the songs still retain air, distance and dreamlike movement. When arranging a song, how conscious are you of that balance between density and space? Is knowing what to remove now as important as knowing what to add?

Peer: I think this is even one of the most important things when it comes to creating a song – to let things breathe, to value the sound by granting it silence.

It’s something we did wrong so often, trying to emphasise a certain feeling or atmosphere by covering it with layers of sonic attributes until it disappeared under all this weight.

I’ve always felt a song to be a bit like light entering a room. You have the illuminated areas, the bright and sometimes overexposed spots, and you have the places where no light can crawl. And you have the places in between, the blurred and indistinct ones… the undecided.

And all together, they make you understand the room, let you guess its architecture. You will never really know what’s in the dark corners, but it’s part of the picture.

Karo: Peer, your voice has such a deep and immediately identifiable resonance that it could very easily dominate these songs, yet on this album it often feels embedded inside the arrangements rather than placed above them. Has your relationship with your own voice changed over the years, particularly in terms of restraint, vulnerability and how much emotion you choose to expose directly?

Peer: First of all, thank you for these flattering and charming words. You should know that I’ve never been unshakeably convinced of my vocal abilities. But yes, after learning about the possibilities and realising the limitations, I feel more confident with my voice.

It’s always some kind of balancing act between seeing the voice simply as an instrument that adds another colour to the canvas and experiencing your own voice as something that communicates all the black and white, the highs and lows that are in your head, which can be very intimate and revealing.

But on the one hand, this is part of the “game.” On the other hand, I guess I’ve found a way to be quite generous with the possibilities of reading and interpreting the lyrics – not for safety reasons, but because I like layering meanings and ciphers and leaving enough space between the lines.

I don’t choose or weigh the amount of emotion my voice might convey through the words. It’s simply the way I feel them…

Karo: I saw Golden Apes at Dark Spring this year, and what struck me again is how differently these songs behave once they become physical performances. Dark Spring is also a festival you curate yourselves. Does spending an entire day surrounded by artists you have deliberately chosen change the way you experience your own performance that evening? Is there a dialogue between the programme you construct and the version of Golden Apes that eventually walks onto the stage?

This year’s edition at Berlin’s Lido brought Golden Apes together with Corpus Delicti, Klez.e, The Devil & The Universe and Varg I Veum.

Peer: I couldn’t even tell you that there are different versions of the band onstage!

As you probably know, when we take the stage, there’s no prepared concept, no elaborate plan or staged execution. It is – as simple as it sounds – four guys playing some songs. And all the parameters that influence the density, intensity and energy are at work, live, in that very moment.

It’s the people, of course, it’s the room, it’s the sound, it’s the texture of the songs themselves or the colour in your head on that day… many things can influence what is happening there on stage.

Of course, it’s inspiring and energising to see other bands perform, to feel the sound, the atmosphere they create and the music acting as a catalyst for your own emotional state, but always in some kind of triggering way, never by comparing or judging.

Karo: I will see you again in Wrocław very soon, this time in a rather different context: the 30th anniversary of Liverpool club and the Castle Party Halloween night. You have played festivals, large stages and clubs across many countries. Does a small club carrying decades of its own scene history demand a different kind of performance from you than a festival stage does, especially with an album as inward and atmospheric as this one?

Golden Apes were scheduled for the October 31 anniversary night in Wrocław alongside Her Own World and Shadows Veil.

Peer: Of course, it’s different whether you’re standing on a big stage at a festival, maybe even in daylight, or on a small one in a foggy room. And for sure, both versions have their own special and unique influence on the way we feel and the way the music feels while performing.

But as I said – it’s nothing that’s planned. It’s this combination of external circumstances and inner condition. And I like both situations very much because they cast a different light on the way you feel the songs in that moment.

There’s something special about seeing the sky above you while singing, just as it’s intense to have the audience an arm’s length away during the show. I can’t even tell you which feels more appropriate for the songs.

It’s a bit like looking at a painting at different times of the day, in different light. It’s the same painting, but its effect can be completely different.

By the way – now that the evening in Wrocław has already taken place, I can tell you how brilliant it was and how much joy it was to play this show. The Liverpool club is really a special venue, and the atmosphere was amazing…

Karo: The album contains several forms of continuation, but very little uncomplicated triumph: the new day in “Resistance” is “not yet bright,” the sun rises in “Helion,” “Evelyn” promises a return that remains somewhere in the future, and the final song looks back at dreams that have already gone.

Do you think “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” ultimately deals less with overcoming darkness than with learning how different states of loss, hope, fear and renewal can exist simultaneously?

Peer: I never really thought about the album in its entirety in this strictly conceptual and narrative way, but if I did, I’d say it is about the balance and the proportion of light and shadow in all things. It is about their dependence on each other and their existential necessity to make the opposing state possible in the first place.

Sure, there can be no shadow without light, but also, what is the point of hope if there’s no presence of hopelessness? And of course, the sun rises only and solely from the dark.

There is not a single state without the other, and we all know that this is what life is about. About the spark even in the blackest darkness and the awareness of the approaching night on a warm, yellow summer day.

It is all there. Laws of physics, laws of emotions…

About Golden Apes

Golden Apes are a German post-punk, darkwave and gothic rock band formed in Berlin in 1998. Centred around vocalist, lyricist and composer Peer Lebrecht, the group has developed a distinctive sound combining atmospheric guitar arrangements, prominent basslines, melodic intensity and poetic, frequently surreal lyrics.

Their debut album, “Stigma 3,” appeared in 2000, followed by a succession of releases including “Thalassemia,” “The Geometry of Tempest,” “The Langsyne Litanies,” “MALVS,” “KASBEK” and “Our Ashes at the End of the Day”. Throughout their career, Golden Apes have toured internationally and appeared at events including Wave-Gotik-Treffen and Castle Party.

Their twelfth studio album, “The Sun Came Up Tremendously,” was released on September 18, 2026, through Icy Cold Records. Recorded and mixed at Thommy Hein Studios in Berlin, the album features Peer Lebrecht (vocals, synthesizers), Maximilian Hennig (guitar), Stephan Schönfeld (guitar), Christian Lebrecht (bass) and Salomon Bosse (drums), with additional guitar contributions from Thommy Hein. Side-Line reviewed the album in October 2026, and the band closed out October with a 30th-anniversary show at Wrocław’s Liverpool club during Castle Party’s Halloween night. Golden Apes’ official site is at goldenapes.com, with the catalogue available via Bandcamp.