Review: Kadavar, I Just Want to Be a Sound & Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin
Posted in Reviews on December 18th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Kadavar have always been a band with scope, from the psychedelic dalliances around their earliest retroist warmth to darker, almost gothic sounds, to quiet, sometimes sad contemplations of life and living. After five years of not releasing an album — their last was 2020’s richly varied, sometimes daringly so The Isolation Tapes (review here) — the Berlin-based now-four-piece issued two in 2025, July’s I Just Want to Be a Sound and November’s Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin, which of course presents the acronym one finds in one of its tracks, “K.A.D.A.V.A.R,” Now, I try my best not to read reviews, ever. Not for lack of interest in the subject matter, but I don’t want to unconsciously bite off someone else’s opinions, so I keep my head down and keep working. But even I saw some of the response, particularly to I Just Want to Be a Sound, which was surprised and not necessarily in a positive way by the brighter, poppier grandiosity of the title-track’s outreach as a divergence from an established norm of underground heavy rock.
I’ll be honest and tell you I don’t know what the audience’s expectation from Kadavar might be at this point. Is it the warm-toned ’70s boogie they wrought on their 2012 debut (discussed here) now 13 years ago? The urbane, modernized hometown tribute Berlin (review here) that in 2015 moved away from those beginnings to a more refined version of craft? What about 2019’s For the Dead Travel Fast (review here) and its sometimes-playful darker approach and thematic? And if you can find a genre to pigeonhole The Isolation Tapes beyond a nothing-sayer like ‘underground progressive,’ you’re better at this than me.
I’m not a Kadavar apologist in no small part because I don’t think they have anything to apologize for. I’m not buddies with the band, though we’ve spoken and in my experience they’re polite and professional. But one respects their work because they’ve never been a stagnant entity, and however much the heavy rock underground might embrace Gen-X ideologies of bands ‘selling out’ when writing accessible material — yes, integrity matters, but I might ask to whom and for what Kadavar would be selling out. If you believe there’s a stack of euros that’s just been waiting for the band to write friendly hooks like “Hysteria” and the dreamier “Strange Thoughts” on I Just Want to Be a Sound, there are numerous realities of today’s music industry being ignored. Which is to say, just because a thing is poppy in some way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pop. Modern pop isn’t this guitar-based. Calm down. Kadavar are still a rock band.
The malleable shape of what that means is the true story of both I Just Want to Be a Sound and Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin, and while the former more readily reaches for the anthemic and the latter sticks to a more grounded approach, there is plenty of overlap in terms of style between the two, whether that’s a song like the garagey “Scar on My Guitar” contrasting some of the lushness throughout I Just Want to Be a Sound or Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin shifting from the hooky proto-punk of “Stick It” (I can’t be the only one thinking of it as a take on Devo‘s “Whip It,” can I?) or the straight-up thrashy finale “Total Annihilation,” which is the most metal Kadavar have ever presented themselves as being, to a piece like “Heartache” earlier on that boasts a shimmer made familiar by the earlier LP. Whether or not they were written that way, the two albums are produced as complements, and the moments of overlap in sound and theme — however bright the songs might come across, one has to recognize that if somebody wants to be a sound, or a shadow in “Let Me Be a Shadow,” they’re also saying they no longer want to be a person — between them emphasize this.
The inevitability of human opinion is well documented — people are gonna feel ways about stuff — but I’m not sure Kadavar are even trying to do anything so inward as encompass their career. Probably I think what they’re doing across these two albums is the same thing they’ve always done: move forward. I don’t know the writing or recording circumstances for either album beyond the fact that they did it themselves and it’s the first batch of songs the band has offered since the base trio of guitarist/vocalist Christoph “Lupus” Lindemann, bassist Simon “Dragon” Bouteloup and drummer Christoph “Tiger” Bartelt brought in guitarist/keyboardist Jascha Kreft (Odd Couple), becoming the four-piece behind this material. I don’t think you can argue that expanding the lineup didn’t also expand their breadth, but the surge of wash in “Sunday Mornings” and the sheer tonal attack of the K.A.D.A.V.A.R.‘s penultimate acronymic title-cut speak to a willful growth that goes beyond personnel. As noted, Kadavar have always been a band who’ve pushed themselves and challenged their own conventions. That impulse remains crucial to what they do.
Kadavar will likely do something else on their next record, and they likely knew that some of the work they were doing here would be polarizing to their fanbase. That they took the risks anyway, that I Just Want to Be a Sound strides as boldly as it does and that Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin speaks to an engrossing history of heavy rock, and that each one is stronger in the context of the other, is all the more admirable. Those who’d mourn something perceived as lost in their sound, I think, have missed something of the point of these albums, but I can’t deny that, as a narrative, one couldn’t just as easily say they made a poppy record to try and grab new ears and then a rocker to reassure their older followers. That’s cynical, and I don’t believe it’s true to the band’s motives, but I admit I have no true insight as to what those are beyond what’s expressed in the material. Ultimately it will be up to a given listener how they embrace one, the other, or all sides of Kadavar‘s work, but I wouldn’t expect the band to wait around either way. More than a decade and several landmark albums later, Kadavar seem most of all interested in continuing to grow.
