"Naked Lunch"

The world, both the big and the small, the near and the somewhat distant, needs hugs, needs embraces. Perhaps now more than ever. And the new, perhaps somewhat unexpected, even unanticipated single from 'Naked Lunch', their first release in seven years, ten years after the soundtrack to the film JACK, twelve years after ALL IS FEVER, their last album to date, is a song like a hug. A strong one, a heartfelt one, one that, dare we say, is genuine. So then - and only then! - even more beautiful and effective when it is reciprocated, returned, carried forward...

Oliver Welter, the voice, heart, and mind of the then Klagenfurt band since 1991, celebrates from Vienna with fellow musicians Boris Hauf and Alex Jezdinsky, as well as producer Wolfgang Lehmann, nothing less than life, the unbroken love for life with all its joys, ecstasies, and possibilities, broken and kept promises, (resolved) contradictions, (overcome) adversities and resistances - "to the fall of every fascist."

Pop in the very best sense, the song draws its transcendent duration and validity from the intensely and so precious moments it outlines and stripes, specific and universal at the same time: "to places where we drink - when we laugh and cry / to those faces we need - when we’re high and dry / to stories I’ve been told - to the truth and to the lie / to all and everyone I love." And: "to those kids out on the streets taking care of human needs / to Billy Wilder movies and to holidays in Greece / to wind in my hair and snow on my tongue / to all and everyone I love."

Thus, TO ALL AND EVERYONE I LOVE sings itself along, an instant choir of potentially many (!) voices of self-empowerment and self-discovery, an anthem of unrestrained empathy that openly insists on itself as a principle. Perhaps it is sentimental, but it is a human, non-grandiose, never exclusive pathos that clearly tells us that the project of humanity is (still!) not necessarily a failure or must fail.

And just like that, TO ALL AND EVERYONE I LOVE, the single, precedes the new Naked Lunch album LIGHTS AND A SLIGHT TASTE OF DEATH. Every beat, every sung line, every sound detail makes it clear why we need Naked Lunch today and how infinitely beautiful it is that they are back: Now and like this!