Die Krupps’ ‘III – Odyssey of the Mind’ turns 31 on 31 July
Die Krupps’ sixth album “III – Odyssey of the Mind” turns 31 on 31 July. The 1995 industrial metal release followed “II – The Final Option” from 1993.
Die Krupps, the German industrial metal and EBM band led by Jürgen Engler, released its sixth studio album “III – Odyssey of the Mind” on 31 July 1995. The record turns 31 this year. The 1995 release came out as a CD, a vinyl LP and a limited boxed set capped at 2,000 copies.
“III – Odyssey of the Mind” holds ten tracks, with all music written by Engler and guitarist Lee Altus and lyrics mostly by Engler, aside from three songs credited to Ralf Dörper. The band on the record comprised Engler on vocals, keyboards, metal percussion and guitar, Altus on guitars, Chris Lietz on drum programming, Dörper on samples and Rüdiger Esch on bass. Tony Platt mixed the album with Frank Duchêne, and John Cremer handled mastering. The album followed “II – The Final Option” from 1993 and preceded “Paradise Now” in 1997, the album that closed out the run of four numbered industrial metal records the band released between 1992 and 1997.
Two singles, “Isolation” and “Scent,” were released from the album in 1995. The track “Odyssey of the Mind” was later remixed by The Sisters of Mercy and appears as a bonus track on the CD edition.
About Die Krupps
Jürgen Engler, Ralf Dörper and Bernward Malaka formed Die Krupps in Düsseldorf in 1980. Engler and Malaka had already played together in Male, one of Germany’s earliest punk bands, before Dörper, an electronic musician, joined them. The band’s debut album, “Stahlwerksynfonie,” followed in 1981, mixing factory noise with metallic percussion and real instruments. Dörper left in 1982 to found Propaganda, and Die Krupps moved toward a more synthesizer-based sound on “Volle Kraft voraus!” the same year. “Entering the Arena” followed in 1985, largely abandoning the metallic percussion for a new wave sound and marking the band’s first English-language material. Die Krupps then went on hiatus.
In 1989, Dörper and Engler produced a new version of the early Die Krupps track “Wahre Arbeit, wahrer Lohn” as “Machineries of Joy” with Nitzer Ebb, and its chart success led to the band’s reactivation. Die Krupps began incorporating heavy metal guitars and sounds from 1992 onward, starting with the album “I” and the covers EP “A Tribute to Metallica.” “II – The Final Option” followed in 1993, its cover influenced by Deep Purple’s “Machine Head.” “III – Odyssey of the Mind,” a more experimental and pensive record, arrived in 1995. The heavier, groove metal-influenced “Paradise Now” closed out the sequence in 1997, after which the band disbanded again.
Engler ran the project DKay.com through the late 1990s and early 2000s before Die Krupps reunited around their 25th anniversary in 2005 and 2006, marked by the compilations “Too Much History – The Electro Years Vol. 1” and “Too Much History – The Metal Years Vol. 2” in 2007. New material returned with the 2010 EP “Als wären wir für immer,” followed by the full albums “The Machinists of Joy” in 2013 and “V – Metal Machine Music” in 2015, the latter revisiting the metal-driven sound of the 1990s. The band released “Vision 2020 Vision” in 2019 and “Songs from the Dark Side of Heaven” in 2021, and has continued releasing singles since, most recently “Will nicht – MUSS!” in 2025 alongside a new deal with Dependent Records for an album due in 2026. Thirty-one years after its release, “III – Odyssey of the Mind” remains the record that marked the band’s turn toward a more introspective take on its industrial metal sound.
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