Golden Apes’ ‘The Sun Came Up Tremendously’ album reviewed
Karo Kratochwil reviews Golden Apes’ twelfth album “The Sun Came Up Tremendously,” released 18 September 2026 on Icy Cold Records.
Golden Apes release “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” on Icy Cold Records on 18 September 2026. The Berlin post-punk and darkwave band’s twelfth studio album runs ten tracks, recorded and produced at Thommy Hein Studios in Berlin, and comes on limited vinyl, digiCD and digital.
Karo Kratochwil reviews “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” below.
Golden Apes ‘The Sun Came Up Tremendously’ review
There is something remarkably assured about the way Golden Apes inhabit their own musical language. “The Sun Came Up Tremendously,” their twelfth studio album, is not concerned with reinvention in any dramatic sense. Instead, it demonstrates what becomes possible when a band has spent more than two decades developing a particular relationship between melody, darkness, emotional restraint and poetic ambiguity. These ten compositions sound unmistakably like Golden Apes, yet familiarity here is not synonymous with predictability. The nuances matter, and much of the album’s considerable beauty emerges from the space between what the music appears to promise and what it ultimately reveals.
The band’s characteristic sound remains intact. Dense, carefully layered guitars give the compositions their breadth, while Christian Lebrecht’s bass supplies much of their physical weight. Salomon Bosse’s drumming introduces a steady, insistent movement, anchoring arrangements that might otherwise drift into abstraction. Above these elements, Peer Lebrecht’s deep, resonant voice occupies a curious position. Its presence is unmistakable, yet it rarely seeks to dominate. It seems to emerge from somewhere within the architecture instead of being placed theatrically in front of the instrumentation, lending the songs an intimacy that persists even at their most expansive.
Recorded and produced at Thommy Hein Studios in Berlin, the album has a careful balance between density and transparency. The guitars can swell into broad, almost architectural structures, yet melodic details remain audible beneath their weight. There is a distinct physicality to the rhythm section, but the music rarely relies on aggression to establish its intensity. Golden Apes understand how repetition can alter perception, how a familiar melodic phrase can acquire another emotional meaning simply through the changing environment around it.
That sensitivity extends to the lyrics, which form an intricate network of recurring images. Light, water, fire, wounds, walls, dreams and celestial bodies appear throughout the record, sometimes as sources of consolation, elsewhere as agents of destruction or reminders of absence. They gradually become part of a shared emotional geography instead of functioning as a collection of independent symbols. Their meanings change depending on where they appear, and those changes are central to the album’s underlying tension.
Light is perhaps the most revealing example. In “The Light (Inside Us),” it is something that has survived an otherwise profound experience of disorientation. Darkness has already entered the world, language has become unreliable, and the possibility of finding a way forward appears uncertain. Yet illumination is presented as something that may have existed within the individual all along. The distinction is important. Recognising the presence of light does not eliminate suffering; it merely changes the relationship one might have with it.
“Radiation” unsettles this apparent reassurance. Here, illumination acquires a more threatening character, capable of exposure, betrayal and destruction. In “Milk And Poison,” the contradiction becomes almost bodily. Nourishment and toxicity coexist, suggesting that what sustains us may also contain the capacity to wound. The imagery moves through suns, moons, stars, graveyards and other familiar elements of gothic poetry, and their significance lies in the unstable relationships they create.
The music develops a comparable tension. There is considerable elegance in the arrangements, yet their melodic clarity never entirely dispels the darkness surrounding them. The guitars can be expansive without becoming triumphal, while the bass and percussion maintain an underlying pressure that prevents the songs from dissolving into pure reverie. What emerges is a recognition that beauty and unease may be inseparable.
“Resistance” offers one of the album’s more explicit gestures toward survival. Its language moves away from passive endurance and toward action, however uncertain the outcome might remain. The possibility of a new day enters the song, but without the reassuring finality ordinarily associated with renewal. The old day is dying, while the next has yet to reveal what it will bring. Hope exists, but it has not become certainty.
This unresolved relationship between destruction and regeneration reaches a particularly interesting point in “Helion,” from which the album takes its title. The imagery becomes more emphatically transformative: fears are undone, wounds are closed, bridges are burned, and the arrival of sunlight seems to announce a decisive change. Yet the composition appears only as the fifth track, with half the album still to unfold.
Its placement substantially alters the significance of that sunrise. In a conventional narrative of recovery, illumination might arrive at the conclusion, offering a reassuring answer to everything that preceded it. Golden Apes instead position it within an ongoing experience. Clarity becomes a moment, and whatever has been overcome does not necessarily disappear from memory. The album continues beyond the light, into territory where absence, grief and uncertainty remain very much alive.
“Where The River Ran” makes that persistence almost painfully tangible. The imagery is stark, populated by exhausted hopes, damaged dreams and the recurring figure of a wounded dog. There is something particularly vulnerable about the latter, an image whose emotional immediacy cuts through the more elaborate symbolism elsewhere. Yet the song does not remain entirely motionless. Waiting, following and the continued desire for light become small, uncertain acts of endurance.
“Evelyn (One Day)” approaches absence from a more intimate perspective. Its fractured smile, falling comets and guarded silences evoke the peculiar instability of memory, in which a person can remain intensely present through details that are already beginning to escape us. The unanswered questions at the centre of the song suggest less an expectation of reunion than a desire to prolong the fragile connection that remembrance permits. Peer Lebrecht’s vocal delivery is particularly suited to such material: his depth of tone lends weight to emotions that might become overly sentimental in a more demonstrative interpretation.
Elsewhere, “City Walls” shifts the emphasis toward identity and self-imposed boundaries. The movement from questions of location toward questions of selfhood transforms its imagery of gates, enclosed spaces and fire into something psychological. Walls may offer protection, but they can also preserve the very isolation they were constructed to prevent. The distinction between refuge and confinement becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
By the closing “Dreams (Gone By),” much of the album’s imagery has been gathered into a meditation on impermanence. Dreams become substances that can be nourished, poisoned, burned, drowned or reduced to ashes. What once appeared intangible acquires an almost physical vulnerability. The recurring elements of water, fire and light no longer suggest separate emotional conditions; they have become different manifestations of the same underlying experience of attachment and loss.
There is a remarkable consistency to this writing, although that consistency also determines the album’s particular demands. Golden Apes rarely seek contrast through abrupt stylistic changes or theatrical shifts in intensity. Their compositions tend to develop within a recognisable atmosphere, allowing distinctions to emerge through melodic inflection, instrumental density and subtle changes in emotional emphasis. It is an approach that rewards patient attention, particularly from listeners willing to follow the interaction between words and music.
I keep returning to the word velvet when thinking about Golden Apes, because velvet possesses several apparently contradictory qualities. It is soft yet substantial, absorbs light while also transforming under it, and can appear almost black from one direction before revealing unexpected depth from another. There is something remarkably similar in the band’s sound. Its surfaces may be smooth, but there is weight beneath them; its melodies can be tender without surrendering their strength. Even the more forceful passages retain an elusive quality, as though their intensity were being felt from a distance.
What makes “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” particularly affecting is that this duality extends beyond its musical character and into its understanding of human experience. The songs acknowledge how profoundly people can be shaped by loss without reducing them to it. Memory becomes both a source of continuity and an obstacle to movement. Desire sustains, but also exposes. Light reveals what darkness has concealed, yet may illuminate wounds that remain unresolved.
There is no uncomplicated promise of transcendence here, nor any insistence that survival must culminate in triumph. Instead, Golden Apes present something more psychologically convincing: the possibility of carrying contradictory emotions without requiring one to cancel the other.
After twelve studio albums, the band’s achievement lies in continuing to find emotional complexity within an established vocabulary. “The Sun Came Up Tremendously” is elegant without being complacent, melancholic without surrendering to despair, and substantial without mistaking sheer volume for intensity. Beneath the layered guitars, persistent rhythms and Peer Lebrecht’s unmistakable voice is an understanding that renewal is rarely a clean break with what preceded it.
The sun does come up here. It simply does not erase the night.
About Golden Apes
Golden Apes is a post-punk and darkwave band from Berlin, Germany, built around vocalist and synth player Peer Lebrecht, who formed the project and released its debut, “Stigma 3.am,” in 2000. The band’s album chronology includes “The Langsyne Litanies” (2014), “MALVS” (2016) and “KASBEK” (2019), followed by the EP “From the Sky” in 2022 and the eleventh album, “Our Ashes at the End of the Day,” in 2024. The current line-up comprises Lebrecht on vocals and synths, Maximilian Hennig and Stephan Schönefeld on guitars, Christian Lebrecht on bass and Salomon Bosse on drums. The band has played festivals including Wave-Gotik-Treffen and Castle Party, and toured Germany, the US, Canada and Russia.
“The Sun Came Up Tremendously,” the band’s twelfth studio album, was recorded and produced at Thommy Hein Studios in Berlin and released on Icy Cold Records on 18 September 2026, continuing the band’s run of studio albums more than two decades after its 2000 debut.
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Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
