Love is one of those things: when it's there, it means work. If it is gone, the black hole of solitude appears to pull us down into its darkness. But what if this great mystery could be seen through? Be understood, made sense of? Well, this is exactly what Luis Ake has set out to do: his new album, LIEBE, German for love, is far more than just a collection of new songs. No, it is nothing less than a readjustment of what German-language pop can be in 2021, as well as the design of a Machine Célibataire, influenced by the literary concept of the same name and Duchamp's artwork “Large Glass”: Ake is a traveler through time and space, through the dimensions of our being as humans in search of an explanation for what we understand as romantic love and its manifold mysteries. Each song represents an element of this complex mechanism, whose inner logic outlines a mechanisation of love and eroticism.

"For me, pop music is an art form that is not exclusively about music," says Ake. It's also about multidimensionality to him, it's about avoiding repetition and embracing pathos, not shying away from big feelings and creating a new world for the listeners, a world in which they can be completely and utterly absorbed, which they can shape and understand as they please. In search of the explanation for love, perhaps, and for the one beautiful dream that is never going to end. Even if you have to journey across dimensions to achieve it.

During the work on LIEBE, Ake has collaborated with a producer for the first time in his career: together with Konrad Betcher, who you might also know from his solo project Minneapolis, but also as a band member and producer for Casper or Dagobert, he locked himself up in a Huysman-esque fashion, far away in a house in the mountains of France, to write and record the album in isolation, surrounded by cows and clouds. Solely Ake's vintage Porsche allowed contact with the outside world – and only when it wasn't stuck in the snow of the cold winter in the Vosges.

The result? A more than worthy successor to Ake's debut "Bitte Lass Mich Frei" from 2019: he breaks away from the gloominess that still characterised his debut and embraces positive feelings, soundscapes and narratives, although not without having this certain yearning for death and destruction, which is always part of the Machine Célibataire, playing in the background. On LIEBE Ake explores the diversity that lies in the theme of love, he describes different situations in all their facets like an observer and pours them into pop anthems that oscillate between the Italo-pop of a Valerie Dore, the Pet Shop Boys, OMD, the hyper-masculine tales of a vanishing world of Herbert Grönemeyer and Scooter’s trance insanity, all with his with his incomparable voice that explores the variety of emotions and sounds anywhere between bass and falsetto.

There is, for example, light-hearted SOMMER, an unleashed Eurodance ode to hot sweaty days, sometime between June and August, those days that feel like they’re never going to end, between euphoria and intoxication, when time and space dissolve into sweat, icecream and happiness. Or UMWEG and KRAFTER, two songs belonging together like fraternal twins: "The detours are more like constructs to help you detach yourself from the past," is how Ake describes UMWEG. With a cheerful voice and surrounded by poppy synth harmonies and driving drums, he rehashes the painful circumstance of living on the same street as one’s former lover: "I feel so alone, let it be like it used to be," he sings in German, only to make a small confession of love as if in passing. Where UMWEG celebrates exalted pop, KRAFTER on the other hand remains strongly reduced, spherical and minimalist, only to explode into a kind of falsetto crooning on the hook and chorus. It's about reunions, about chocolate, about sex and about the fact that it’s hard to fill the holes in your heart with just another random person.

With LIEBE Luis Ake has created nothing less than a milestone of contemporary pop: schooled in Scooter and Huysmans, in Mo-Do and Marcel Duchamp, in Synth Pop, Wave, Elektro, Italo and NDW, in pop culture across epochs and cultural disciplines, he creates something that is completely of his own. Each track of LIEBE takes another genre as its model and yet transforms it again into Luis Ake’s very own sound, melancholic and life-affirming at the same time, electronic and warm, danceable and narrative and above all: completely and utterly unique.