Rue Oberkampf interview: ‘If we become predictable, it’s time to stop’

Rue Oberkampf‘s “Wehmut” is not simply a darker or quieter variation on what the band has done before. The more consequential change is where the music now seems to take its instructions from. Julia de Jouy and Oliver Maier say that although they have recorded much of Rue Oberkampf’s music in a rented cabin in the woods, their more club-oriented work was historically fed by the city. On “Wehmut”, the landscape itself moves into the composition: the Lower Bavarian environment in which they grew up, the Goldsteig trail, the sea between Belgium and Finland, and field recordings that retain the identity of the places where they were captured.

That geographical shift coincides with a musical one. Ten years into Rue Oberkampf, the duo feel that much of the current darkwave cycle, including its successive waves and hypes, has already been told. Post-metal and dark folk became important not as genres to imitate, but because of their ability to accumulate tension, physical weight and atmosphere. At the same time, “Wehmut” does not reject the band’s club history. Instead, it seems to open another vocabulary that can eventually be brought back into harder music.

The title is equally precise. Rue Oberkampf distinguish “Wehmut” from nostalgia: nostalgia fixes its attention on something irretrievably past, while Wehmut, as they understand it, can be experienced and even enjoyed in the present, carrying longing without requiring loss. That distinction runs through a record concerned with landscape, transience, language and the limited amount of the world any one person can experience.

I spoke with Rue Oberkampf about longing for places never visited, why six tracks were enough, using languages as musical materials, what field recordings preserve, the influence of post-metal, the next stage of their live presentation, and why predictability would ultimately be a reason to stop.

Rue Oberkampf interview

Karo: “Wehmut” has no exact English equivalent; it sits somewhere between melancholy, nostalgia and longing, but none of those words quite contains it. What interested you in building an album around an emotion that becomes less precise the moment you translate it? Does naming a feeling clarify it, or can language also reduce something that is valuable precisely because it remains difficult to define?

Rue Oberkampf: Nearly two years ago, we started recording the first fragments of “Wehmut”, and we both had the feeling from the very beginning that this was going to develop in a different direction from the things we had done before.

During the creative process, the word “Wehmut” emerged naturally because that was the feeling we both experienced at the time. And yes, we completely agree that the word loses some of its emotional depth when you translate it. But we wanted the title to be a word that expressed something we felt deeply within ourselves.

For us, it’s much more about the feeling than the word itself. Wehmut is also closely connected to the region where we were both born and raised.

Karo: What I find most intriguing about “Wehmut” is the possibility of missing not only something lost, but something never actually experienced. That almost produces nostalgia without memory. Where does such longing come from for you? Can an imagined place become emotionally as real as a remembered one?

Rue Oberkampf: We’re very lucky to have seen many beautiful places around the world. We filmed a video in Patagonia for “Congélation”, experienced temple stays in South Korea, and saw […] landscapes and cities in Japan.

During the production of “Wehmut”, we experienced the rough sea on a container ship travelling between Belgium and Finland, and we hiked along the old Goldsteig trail through the Bavarian Forest. Experiences like these stay with you. And as soon as you’re back home, you start missing those places.

At the same time, you become aware that there are thousands of other places in the world that you will never see, simply because there isn’t enough time in one life. You can long for something you’ve never even seen. You can imagine its beauty, but you’ll never know what it actually feels like.

That’s a beautiful, but also painful, kind of longing. And this is one part of where Wehmut comes from for us.

Karo: Four years separate “Wehmut” from “Liebe”, yet the new album consists of only six tracks. Was that concentration deliberate from the beginning, or did the record simply reach a point where adding more would have altered its emotional proportions? How do you recognise when an album has said enough?

Rue Oberkampf: You’re right with the second thought. We knew the recording was finished when we felt that every facet of our experience of “Wehmut” had found its place somewhere on the album.

Some feelings and emotions don’t necessarily become stronger by repeating them over and over again. Sometimes, saying enough is part of saying something honestly.

“Blanc Poney” in particular is a song we’ve loved for years, but we always had the feeling that “Liebe” was the wrong album for it and simply wasn’t the right time to tell that story. So we completely rearranged and re-recorded it from scratch, to bring its soul to a new and more loving home with “Wehmut”.

And there’s also a more technical reason: vinyl generally sounds better when you put fewer songs on each side. But that was really more of a nice side effect than a reason for making the album shorter.

Karo: The track titles move between English, French, German and Bavarian dialect: “Tonight”, “Come on Moon”, “Blanc Poney”, “Into the Woid”, “Sonne”, “Darkness”. Does changing language also change the emotional temperature of a song for you? Are there ideas that become more intimate, more distant or even more truthful when expressed outside your primary language?

Rue Oberkampf: Maybe yes. In fact, we choose languages like we choose instruments or sounds.

We close our eyes, listen to what we already have, and eventually words, phrases or even entire sentences come to us very intuitively. We can’t really decide which language we’re going to use before we have the basic structure and sounds of a song. Sometimes the vibe simply seems to call for a certain language.

The language becomes part of the sound and atmosphere of the song rather than just a vehicle for the lyrics. Creating art is mostly about listening to what comes up and recognising the diamond ideas hidden within it, and then taking a lot of time to shape and polish those diamonds.

Karo: “Into the Woid” is particularly interesting because “Woid” immediately roots the song in a very specific linguistic and geographical landscape. Rue Oberkampf has always carried a cosmopolitan identity, beginning with the French name itself. Was there a conscious desire with “Wehmut” to move away from abstraction and allow actual geography to become part of the project’s identity?

Rue Oberkampf: We both grew up in an area of Lower Bavaria with dense, dark forests, small hidden creeks, lots of snow and a lot of rough, untamed nature in general. There are many tiny villages with strong local dialects, surrounded by deep forests.

There were times when some of these places could be cut off from civilisation for months during the winter. Even today, you can still feel how deeply this environment has shaped the people who live there.

That’s one of the reasons why we’ve recorded almost every Rue Oberkampf album since the beginning in a rented cabin in the woods. But until now, the inspiration for most of our more club-oriented songs came primarily from the city.

This time, it was different. We didn’t just record in this area and let the surroundings influence the atmosphere of the recording process. We consciously drew inspiration from the landscape itself, from memories and situations connected to it, and from the particular atmosphere of that region.

Karo: The album contains literal traces of places: forest recordings from Buchberger Leite, waves from Kiel, and woodland and owl sounds in “Into the Woid”. A field recording seems documentary, yet the moment it enters a composition it acquires another meaning. Do you regard those sounds as evidence of places you experienced, or as raw material from which an entirely fictional landscape can be constructed?

Rue Oberkampf: Actually, the field recordings we use on “Wehmut” are very clearly recognisable as the sounds of the specific places where we recorded them.

We didn’t sample them in order to integrate them into melodies or beats, or to create some kind of fictional soundscape. Instead, we wanted to bring the original atmosphere of those places into our songs. In a way, we wanted the music to carry a piece of the actual place with it.

The recordings are therefore more like traces or memories of real places than raw musical material.

Karo: Post-metal appears among the influences around “Wehmut”, although the record does not simply adopt the obvious vocabulary of that genre. What interested you in it beyond guitars or heaviness? Was it more about duration, accumulation, dynamics, physical weight, or the way tension can be sustained without immediate resolution?

Rue Oberkampf: Rue Oberkampf has existed for ten years now, and both of us have the feeling that the story of current darkwave and its many waves and hypes has been told. We felt the need to express something different. Something more organic, mystical and profound.

For quite some time, we’ve been listening to many different styles of music, especially post-metal and dark folk. We think that most listeners, apart from perhaps noticing the guitars, wouldn’t necessarily associate “Wehmut” with post-metal. But for us, it was one of the album’s major influences.

What interested us wasn’t so much the genre itself, or simply adding heaviness to our sound. It was more the way post-metal can create an atmosphere, build tension and evoke something physical and almost overwhelming.

We didn’t want to copy the style. We wanted to take what inspired us, filter it through our own musical language, and make it feel like Rue Oberkampf.

Karo: There is an interesting movement through the titles themselves: “Tonight”, the moon, “Sonne”, then finally “Darkness”. I don’t want to impose a narrative that may not be there, but did sequencing the six tracks create an emotional chronology of its own? When you order a record like this, are you constructing a journey or simply finding the most revealing relationship between separate states?

Rue Oberkampf: We didn’t do this on purpose, but you’re right: the titles all seem to come from a similar direction.

They capture different facets of some of the most exciting and inspiring moments of the “day”: sunrise, sunset and the night. There’s something about these fleeting, hard-to-grasp or dark moments that really resonates with the mystical atmosphere of “Wehmut”.

They’re moments that are difficult to hold onto. They appear, change and disappear almost before you’ve had the chance to fully grasp them. We think that quality of transience naturally became part of the album.

Karo: You end the album description with the invitation to “be wehmütig with us”. That turns the listener from an observer into a participant. Is “Wehmut” primarily trying to describe an emotional state, or to induce one? And is there an important difference, for you, between understanding an emotion intellectually and actually being placed inside it by music?

Rue Oberkampf: As you can see when you come to our shows, we love experiencing emotions together with the audience. So for us, it’s much more about the experience than about intellectually describing an emotion.

We always play our new songs to friends before releasing them to see what other people experience when they listen to them. “Into the Woid” was one of the songs that most of the people who heard it beforehand described as being extremely, or even too, sad, which we actually loved because that was exactly what we wanted to express.

In that sense, music can do something that words or explanations can’t: it can put you inside a feeling instead of simply telling you what that feeling is.

So yes, for us, “Wehmut” is definitely more about inducing an emotional state than explaining it.

Karo: “The Singles 2018-2026” and “Wehmut” arrive only months apart. One release deliberately gathers eight years of Rue Oberkampf’s past, while the other revolves around memory, longing and absence. Did encountering your own catalogue retrospectively change your relationship to those themes, or is artistic memory fundamentally different from personal nostalgia?

Rue Oberkampf: With “The Singles 2018-2026”, we’re kind of closing a big chapter in our band’s history. That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop producing club-oriented tracks. But we felt that the next chapter, which opens with the very dark and calm “Wehmut”, needed a clean slate and its own space.

As for the connection between the two releases, we think there is an important distinction between nostalgia and Wehmut.

To us, nostalgia is always about looking back at something that is over, dwelling on the past, on something that can never come back. There’s a certain helplessness to it.

Wehmut feels different. It’s a feeling you can actually embrace and enjoy in the present moment. It’s about longing, but nothing necessarily has to be over or lost. In that sense, Wehmut can even contain a positive impulse towards the future. You can feel the longing without simply looking backwards.

Maybe that’s also why “Wehmut” doesn’t feel like an album about the past to us. It’s more about being deeply aware of the need to stay focused on the present and enjoy it to the fullest.

Karo: I’ve seen Rue Oberkampf live several times, and at Castle Party this year I was struck again by how much intensity you create through restraint: very little movement can make a gesture suddenly carry enormous weight, while the light alternately reveals and removes you from view. Does “Wehmut” require a different physical or visual language onstage? How do you translate absence, distance and landscape into performance without illustrating them too literally?

Rue Oberkampf: Yes, we will definitely change some things onstage, but we won’t suddenly become a completely different band after the release. We will absolutely continue playing songs like “Solitude” or “Deine Augen”.

But with the new atmosphere that comes with the “Wehmut” songs, we feel that we can tell even more complete stories onstage, with an exposition, a climax and, eventually, a catastrophe.

The only exception so far will be a very special two-day event we’re planning in Leipzig in April 2027. We’re currently working on it together with the local promoter, and the idea is to create two completely different worlds over these two nights.

Friday will be dedicated entirely to the dark, atmospheric and almost ritualistic side of “Wehmut”, while Saturday will take things in the opposite direction: harder, faster, harsher and extremely club-oriented.

We’re planning special support acts, lighting, video and stage design for both nights, so the two shows will feel less like two concerts and more like two different chapters of the Rue Oberkampf universe. We’re really excited about what this could become.

Karo: “Wehmut” brings landscape, acoustic elements and field recordings into a project whose live identity remains intensely electronic and physical. Once these songs begin accumulating their own histories through performance, what do you want them to change about Rue Oberkampf? Has this record opened a territory you already know you want to explore further?

Rue Oberkampf: For now, we’ve created only dark and calm songs with this particular vibe. We’re very excited to see what impact this inspiration and these influences will have on future, harder or more club-oriented Rue Oberkampf songs.

We already have a lot of ideas for new sounds, instruments and even different singing techniques. In this increasingly digitalised world and the current Zeitgeist that inspired us to create “Wehmut”, there are still so many sources of inspiration and impulses waiting to be translated into new Rue Oberkampf songs.

So yes, we think “Wehmut” has opened up a territory that we definitely want to explore further, but we’re not quite sure yet where it will take us.

Karo: And to finish by looking forward: after “The Singles 2018-2026”, “Wehmut” and the next cycle of live shows, what feels most important for Rue Oberkampf not to become? Is there a version of the project, musically, visually or creatively, that would feel too comfortable or too predictable, and therefore tell you it is time to change direction again?

Rue Oberkampf: We’ve never been the kind of band that recreates “Glycine” twenty times with only minor changes just because it works well on streaming and makes us more predictable for Spotify.

The focus of Rue Oberkampf has always been on trying things out, taking risks and experiencing our songs together with our live audience in an emotional way.

For us, the magic of playing live comes from seeing how people react when the next song doesn’t simply start the way the previous one ended. We like to surprise people and to create moments where they don’t quite know what’s coming next.

That can sometimes be unpredictable and less comfortable, but it creates suspense and turns a concert into a shared journey. We’re personally bored by movies that try to convey just one single feeling for two hours.

We have a strong inner drive that keeps us from getting bored and pushes us to always try something new. So if we ever become completely predictable, we’ll probably know that it’s time to stop.

About Rue Oberkampf

Rue Oberkampf was founded at the end of 2016 in southern Germany by three DJs: Julia de Jouy, Oliver Maier and Damien De-Vir. Young & Cold Records describes the original concept as a collision between the energy of 1980s electronic music and the physical environment of techno-era club culture. The group’s own 2026 retrospective credits De-Vir as a member from 2016 to 2023; the current “Wehmut” writing credits belong to Julia de Jouy and Oliver Maier.

Their first substantial release was the six-track “Waveclash” in 2018 on No Emb Blanc, followed by the debut album “Christophe-Philippe” on Young & Cold Records in 2019. The 2020 “Negativraum” release appeared through ant-zen, while the second full-length “Liebe” followed on Young & Cold in 2022. Its material moved between EBM and techno-informed tracks, synthpop and darkwave while continuing the band’s multilingual use of French, German and English.

The six-track “Essenz” arrived in November 2024. In July 2026, Rue Oberkampf released “The Singles 2018-2026”, collecting “Eternity”, “Eiszeit”, “Solitude”, “I Won’t Surrender (Brutal Edit)”, “Negativraum”, “Sans Toi”, “Deine Augen” and “Never Stop to Dance”. Its credits explicitly document the earlier trio formation and make the compilation a useful dividing line between that period of the band and what follows.

“Wehmut” contains six tracks: “Tonight”, “Come on Moon”, “Blanc Poney”, “Into the Woid”, “Sonne” and “Darkness”. The album is released through Young & Cold Records in October 2026; Bandcamp lists the digital release for 15 October, while the label’s own store gives 16 October. The vinyl is mastered by Eric Van Wonterghem, while Ludwig Maier masters the digital and CD editions. Field recordings include forest sound captured at Buchberger Leite for “Darkness”, waves recorded at Falkensteiner Strand in Kiel for “Sonne”, and Scottish owl and forest recordings from the BBC Sound Library for “Into the Woid”. The artwork and design are by Kinnat Sóley.

For Rue Oberkampf, “Wehmut” therefore arrives at an unusually explicit dividing point: ten years into the project, immediately after a retrospective gathering eight years of singles, and at the moment when the duo themselves say they no longer find repetition of the current darkwave vocabulary artistically sufficient. The record does not erase the club-oriented Rue Oberkampf; their own answers make clear that they are already interested in what these quieter, more organic and geographically rooted ideas might do once they are pushed back into harder music.