Great Spotted Woodpecker - K5 Tour 2025/26

**Construct 5**

On March 14, 2025, "Construct 5" will be released. The new album by the Vienna-based indie chamber pop collective Buntspecht is imbued with radically wild beauty and hallucinatory-psychedelic intensity. In dark times, Buntspecht offers confidence and warmth.

The confusion begins with the title: "Construct 5" is the name of the new album by the Vienna group Buntspecht, and one naturally relates it directly to the number of their previous albums, until one realizes: "Construct 5" is actually the sixth Buntspecht album, not the fifth. This makes it clear that Buntspecht cannot be approached with a pedantic sense of order or any classical category.

Much more important for understanding the group Buntspecht is the word before the number: A construct, according to the Duden dictionary - and now it gets a bit convoluted! - is a "working hypothesis or conceptual aid for the description of explored phenomena," which is always and forever what Buntspecht creates, because this music inherently possesses something temporary, unstable, and fragile, which is part of its allure. It’s about the power and magic of the moment, about what is happening right now and what can be made of it. Spoiler: A lot!

The already quite high, sometimes pleasantly reminiscent of Hamilton Leithauser voice of Lukas Klein nearly tips into hysteria at the beginning of the first single "Im Fluss" (In the Flow) when he sings: "No matter what the morning brings, no matter." No wonder: One must be completely crazy, hysterical, insane to seriously claim in these times: "Today is beautiful, yes everything is in the flow, today is a good day," which is why Lukas hastens to sing afterward: "Everything goes down the river." This is the tension within which Construct 5 operates.

In the waning winter of 2024, the singer and guitarist Lukas Klein first met with Florentin Scheicher (piano, vocals, trumpet) for a first session in an old house belonging to Klein's family at the foot of the Rax Mountains, which was to lay the foundation for "Construct 5." Snow still lay on the peaks, the first green sprouted in the valleys, the air was clear, and the minds were free.

The vibe for this session was: At the slightest feeling of resistance or unwillingness, the idea would be set aside and another pursued. The two musicians were after radical lightness. "We locked ourselves in there for a week and had a lot of fun," Lukas Klein recounts. "We worked on song ideas every day from nine in the morning until three at night." Layers and samples from these sessions found their way unchanged onto the final album, small constructs, if you will. These miniature artifacts formed the basis of an album that was ultimately - as always with Buntspecht - developed together in the established lineup of Antonia Luksch (cello, vocals), Roman Geßler (saxophone), Florian Röthel (drums), and Jakob Lang (bass), supplemented with additional songs, and recorded in the studio.

Mood and composition were almost more important than the lyrics; melodies took center stage: "The lyrics often emerged from the composition this time," says Lukas, "whereas before it was usually the other way around: The music had to follow the lyrics." A working method that the entire band found to be extremely liberating, as they could completely immerse themselves in the music.

The work on songs in this band still happens predominantly intuitively, almost unconsciously. And perhaps the album owes its bittersweetness to this approach. The fundamental attitude on Construct 5: Optimism born from fatalism. "Everything goes down the creek" was, for example, one of the first lines that Florentin freestyled on the unfinished song, but it then became "Everything remains in the flow." One must not let the whole madness out there completely break one down, even if that is not always easy.

"It’s not so easy right now," Lukas confirms. "Wars, crises, Trump, Gaza - it’s nearly impossible to write light pieces in these highly politicized times. You don’t want to have these themes one-to-one in your art, but they are, of course, automatically a part of it. For me, it’s about internalizing that and not negating it, while at the same time maintaining a certain lightness." "Construct 5" is thus the outstanding artistic document of a constructive engagement with darkness.

The work on "Construct 5" was always a rebellion against the circumstances, a struggle for beauty and an attempt to preserve a piece of it. "Way Down Alley" embodies this approach musically like hardly any other piece, a psychedelic flow that leads into infinity.

"Way Down Alley" owes its existence to a small accident: Florentin accidentally shifted a track incorrectly while working on the song. "That was actually a mistake from which something extremely interesting emerged rather accidentally," says Lukas. "From there, we built the piece together in the studio, although quite deliberately. What’s funny is that hardly any other piece sounds as spontaneous and jam-based as 'Way Down Alley.'"

Such spontaneous inspirations are essential for this band. The ballad "Vom Kopf der Hut" (From the Head of the Hat), the elegiac "Die Stadt in dir" (The City in You), the spoken-word meditation "Was hält dich hier?" (What Holds You Here?) - these songs gently offer confidence, are enveloped in a captivating melancholy, and are imbued with superb musicality. They encourage one to keep going in the knowledge of the darkness.

"How fast the wind blows, I never really understood," sings Lukas Klein in the brilliantly sparkling "Wenn du jetzt gehst" (If You Leave Now), the refrain of which one never forgets once heard. But who really understands that?

The indie chamber pop of Buntspecht is characterized by a dystopian romance, a radically wild beauty, an insane intensity, as well as a sincerity and artistic freedom that is hard to find these days. Because it knows of our powerlessness. Thus, Buntspecht offers warmth and hope in dark times.