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The title of Maximilian Hecker's tenth studio album does indeed allude to J. M. Barrie's Neverland, i.e. to the island where Peter Pan is living a life in eternal youth. However, Hecker's Neverheart, unlike Barrie's Neverland, is not at all positively connoted, for the tongue-in-cheek neologism has to be regarded as a Wilhelm Hauff cold or rather: stony heart (see Wilhelm Hauff, "Heart of Stone", 1827) – that sort of stony heart that the protagonist of NEVERHEART is constantly confronted with in his wretched, or more precisely: two-toned love songs. Be it his own Neverheart that constantly screams "devotion" and yet performs avoidance, or that one of the respective playmates who – in the sense of mirroring the singer’s emotional ambivalence – used to say "white" and yet act black, and who leave the whispering pleader "alone to stay with him all night" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), who "drive him away and pull him into their hearts" (Two-toned Love, part I), who "fall in love and fall apart" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), while the falsetto singer "blooms in their shades and fades in their lights", "breathes in their fears and drowns in their hopes" (Fall in Love, Fall Apart), always "reaching out to rise and yet to fall" (Neverheart).

Maximilian Hecker was supported in the sound implementation of his neverheartache and his two-toned lovesickness by his congenial partners Johannes Feige (production) and Peter "Jem" Seifert (mix) – the former already the producer of Hecker’s albums "Spellbound Scenes of My Cure" (2015) and "Wretched Love Songs" (2018), the latter collaborator and producer of renowned German acts like Udo Lindenberg, Andreas Bourani and Ich + Ich – who gave NEVERHEART its oppressive breadth and defined elusiveness, and countered the wretchedness of the album's lyrical content with a (two-)tonal grace, a sound that could rightly be called "larger-than-low-life": a piano, a Gizmotron, an Organelle, electric, almost no acoustic guitars, an abysmal synthesizer bass, subdued or­ches­tral per­cus­sion, revolting from time to time along with the electric guitars in order to drown Heckers low falsetto, his fallen angel's voice that occasionally soars to unexpected heights before eventually rising up back to the ground.


[PRODUCTION & CREDITS]

All songs written by Maximilian Hecker.
Produced by Johannes Feige at WoAnderland Studio, Berlin.
Mixed and mastered by Peter »Jem« Seifert at Blacksheep Studio, Neuss.
Published by it sounds/Universal Music Publishing.
Artwork by Maximilian Hecker.
Vocals and pianos recorded by Maximilian Hecker.
All other instruments recorded by Johannes Feige.
Vocals, pianos, acoustic guitars and drums performed by Maximilian Hecker.
Electric guitars, baritone guitars, bass guitars, Gizmotrons, Rhodes, Wurlitzers and synthesizers performed by Johannes Feige.
Strings and woodwinds on Neverheart arranged by Johannes Lehniger.


Distributed by MOrecords