Neue Neue Deutsche Welle started in a YouTube comment. RateYourMusic just made it a movement.

RateYourMusic runs a weekly round-up of what changed on the site: chart movements, playlist features, whatever got added to the genre tree. Last week's had one line under New Movement. Sep 12: Neue Neue Deutsche Welle.

That is how a genre becomes official now. Not a magazine essay, not a scene report. A line item in the taxonomy catalogue nerds actually use, posted on a Saturday next to the chart notes and the playlist updates.

The name got there by an even stranger route.

The comment box named it

In 1979 a journalist called Alfred Hilsberg wrote about the German punk and new wave bands coming up around Düsseldorf, Hamburg and West Berlin for the magazine Sounds, and called the thing Neue Deutsche Welle. Coined in print, by a critic, in an editorial. Textbook.

The sequel was named by a stranger under a YouTube video.

Edwin Rosen, born 1998 in Stuttgart, released his first single "leichter//kälter" at the end of 2020 — cold synths, reverbed guitar, German lyrics delivered like he's had enough of the conversation. Someone left a comment calling it Neue Neue Deutsche Welle. He liked the joke and put it in his Spotify bio. He has since told Diffus that the term is taken more seriously than he expected, and that the band Lyschko had been using it before him without his knowing.

So: comment box, artist bio, press, genre tree. Six years, no critic required. Rosen's EP mitleerenhänden arrived in 2021 on a Universal sublabel, two of his singles have gone gold in Germany, and Spotify put "Vertigo" among its 50 best indie songs of 2022. His stated reference points are Joy Division, New Order, The Cure and, wonderfully, Blink-182.

Around him there's an actual cohort: Lyschko, Temmis in Tübingen, Steintor Herrenchor in Hannover, Gwen Dolyn in Darmstadt, Mia Morgan, Flawless Issues, a dozen more who mostly met online and mostly sing in German over drum machines. It sounds like the cold machine end of coldwave rebuilt by people who grew up on playlists. The lineage is honest: DAF, Grauzone, the bleak end of 1981.

The wave that was already there

Here's where the tag gets clumsy.

Germany has had a loud German-language guitar scene running since 2010, and it has nothing to do with Spotify bios.

Die Nerven formed in Stuttgart in 2010 around Max Rieger and Julian Knoth. Fun (2014) got called one of the most important and best German-language records of the decade by Der Spiegel, which is the kind of sentence that either kills a band or sets it loose; they made Out in 2015, Fake in 2018, a self-titled record in 2022, WIR WAREN HIER in 2024, and Rieger spent the same years producing other people's records, Casper among them. Messer have been going since 2010 out of Münster, five albums deep and still the most literary of the lot. Karies, Trümmer, Friends of Gas — bands whose names are already complaints.

Isolation Berlin started in 2012. Their debut Und aus den Wolken tropft die Zeit (February 2016) landed eighth on Musikexpress's album list for German bands that year, and Tobias Bamborschke sings like a man reading his own diary out loud in a room he wishes were emptier.

None of this is new wave. It's guitars, tape hiss, distortion, and a vocal tradition that runs somewhere else.

The 2016 argument the tag erases

Which brings up the one moment when these two halves stood in the same room and disliked each other in public.

Drangsal is Max Gruber, born 1993, raised in Herxheim in the Palatinate. Harieschaim came out in April 2016: synth-pop and post-punk built from Depeche Mode and The Smiths, German lyrics, huge reverb. It won him the Preis für Popkultur newcomer award that year and an Echo nomination the next. If you want one record where the young synth wave and the older guitar wave touch, it's this one.

In April 2016 the taz pop blog ran a piece under the headline "Endlich wieder Beef" — finally, beef again. Isolation Berlin had needled Drangsal's "Jenny Elvers" video in an interview; Gruber went after rock music generally and Isolation Berlin specifically in Spiegel and elsewhere. Underneath the sniping was a real disagreement about whether a German pop song should be immediate or should make you work for it.

Ten years later a tag arrives that files both answers under one word. That is my problem with it — not that it's silly, but that it's flattening. Neue Neue Deutsche Welle describes a sound: cold, synthetic, sung in German, descended from 1981. Die Nerven and Messer share exactly one of those attributes.

The family tree runs through Hamburg

If you want the ancestors of the guitar half, you don't go to Düsseldorf. You go to Hamburg, about a decade later.

Blumfeld's Ich-Maschine (1992), Tocotronic's Digital ist besser (1995), Die Sterne, most of it on L'Age D'Or — the cluster German critics called the Hamburger Schule and, better, Diskurspop. Hermetic, self-interrogating lyrics, theory in the bloodstream, a German that refused both Schlager sentiment and translated-from-English indie. Every band who now sings about being unwell in a German city over a detuned guitar is working in that language, whether they cite it or not. Jochen Distelmeyer wrote the rulebook and half the scene has never read it.

Two lineages, then. The synth kids come from 1981 and, one step further back, from the machine end of krautrock. The guitar bands come from Hamburg's discourse pop. They overlap on one point: after twenty years of German bands singing in English to sound serious, everyone here sings in German, and nobody treats it as a limitation.

What the tag is good for

I'd still keep it. Names that come from below tend to stick better than names handed down by critics — "shoegaze" was an insult, "krautrock" was a British joke, and both outlived everyone who objected. Neue Neue Deutsche Welle at least has the virtue of pointing backwards: a 19-year-old who found Rosen on a playlist can follow the word to Grauzone and DAF in one hop.

It just shouldn't be a bucket for every German-language band with a dark sleeve. Rosen's wave is a real scene with a sound, six years behind it, and a naming story nobody would have believed in 1979.

If you have opinions about where Die Nerven or Drangsal belong in that tree, the ratings and comments below are the place for them. A comment box got a genre into RateYourMusic. Yours can at least settle an argument.