Manfred Engelmayr was in Berlin in the early 2000s with no fixed plans. He traveled around helping people build houses or renovate them. Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg carried what he calls a magical aura, though the site was uncomfortable enough to feel like a survival camp. He went there to help repair an old baroque stable, part of the artists’ residence Heimo Wallner co-runs. Working on the roof, Fredl noticed Heimo was singing constantly. Not for anyone. Just singing.
“The fervor, coupled with the casual ease with which he did it, impressed me, and I sensed that Heimo has that ‘certain something’ in his singing voice,” Fredl said. “It’s not about right or wrong or virtuosity but about passion and narrative power. I love listening to that voice.”
They cobbled together a first song called “sono solo” in the days that followed, borderline silly, deeply melancholic, and it felt right. A handwritten note went up in the dining room: “3 Songs by September 2.”
That was 2002. Fugu’s new album, “Last Note,” their second full-length, arrives on Rock Is Hell Records on June 19, 2026. It is an avant-pop record, ten songs long, and it lands 22 years past that dining-room instruction.
Fugu have always been a long-distance band. First Schrattenberg to Berlin, later Vermont to Vienna.
Heimo is a visual artist, a trumpet player, and co-organizer of the Hotel Pupik artists’ residence; he lives in Vermont. Manfred, better known as Fredl, plays in Bulbul, Broken.Heart.Collector, and Exit Void, and is based in Vienna. Bulbul’s territory is energetic, hard-hitting music. Fugu is the opposite: songs built around a voice and a lyric.
In 2005 Heimo was invited to show work at Gallery รฉf in Tokyo, and they turned it into a Fugu event. Three weeks in residence. He made an abstract animation and they recorded an improvised soundtrack for it.
The film was projected through a hole in the ceiling onto a fluffy white rug on the floor below, so people sat around it like around a campfire. Upstairs the gallery showed fifty lathe-cut singles with their first songs.
Heimo hand-drew every cover. Twenty percent of the singles were cut while the studio’s CD player was skipping, so there are copies out there with a fixed digital glitch pressed into the groove. They played three concerts, each with different Japanese guest artists: Haco, Taku Sugimoto, Chika Sai, and Shinji Komiya, who joined on self-made instruments.
After Tokyo the band expanded. Martin Zrost came in on bass and saxes, Bernhard Breuer (Elektro Guzzi) on drums. Under the name Fugu And The Cosmic Mumu, they recorded a debut album called “Off” in 2008 and pushed the sound harder, with more drive.
That formation opened for Lambchop, which Heimo remembers as very nice. Then the curse of playing with excellent musicians kicked in: everyone was busy. Heimo started spending more and more time in the United States. From 2009 onward Fugu played only sporadically, usually as the original duo.
In 2014 Fredl and Heimo built and performed on a large subbass organ for a festival in Austria. The event fell during the soccer World Cup final, so the audience was small. The organ had a fruitful afterlife at other occasions, though Heimo notes that the transport is absolutely insane every single time.
Covid gave the band its next opening. Heimo made a drawing animation called “let go” and the Fugu song of the same title became its soundtrack. It came out on Rock Is Hell Records. A single with “Influencer” and “Broken Record” followed in 2024. By 2025 the momentum had picked up. Heimo spent a full year back in Austria, and “Last Note” was finished.
The record sits where Fredl’s soft spot always was. Everything hangs off the voice and the lyric. Around that center the ensemble moves in and out: trumpet from Heimo, guitar, piano, and organ from Fredl, and a rotating cast of guests filling out the sound. Bernhard Breuer returns on drums.
Susanna Gartmayer plays bass clarinet, Mona Matbou Riahi plays clarinet and sings, Kasho Chualan sings, and Lukas Lauermann plays cello. Martin Zrost arranged. Oliver Brunbauer mixed, Bernd Heinrauch mastered. The songs move between political rants and personal laments, love songs and something the band calls a “ridiculous carnival.” The center of the record remains Heimo’s voice: not a technically trained instrument, but the storyteller Fredl fell for on that Schrattenberg roof.
The title carries some ambivalence on purpose. “Of course, the title suggests that this might be the last release,” Fredl said. “That applies to the album just as much as it does to every time you cross the street on a red light.” Heimo pushes back on the finality reading.
The song “Last Note” is not a farewell to the band, he said. It is a bitter piece “about self pity turning into the nastiest act of aggression.” He would have preferred to call the album “Broken Record,” after the 2024 single, but that track came from different recording sessions and did not sit right on this record.
Fredl’s favorite on the album is “Photoshopland.” Heimo wrote the lyrics and the music. Martin Zrost, Heimo’s brother and one of the Cosmic Mumus, arranged it. The band already played “Photoshopland” fifteen years ago, so the song has had time to mature into the version Fredl finally hears now. “It’s exactly how I always wanted it to be soundwise, and that really doesn’t happen very often,” he said. “Lyrically, as is so often the case with Fugu, it’s a romantic love song with kind of a meta-plot-twist, something unsettling lurking beneath the surface despite all the beauty. I especially love how the story is interwoven with Photoshop-features and -tools.”
Heimo picked “Oida” for sentimental reasons that come in two parts. First, his son wrote the melody at eleven years old, when he had just started playing trumpet. They turned it into a 5/8 rhythm just because they could not really play it. Second, years later Heimo wrote the dialect lyrics for someone who is like a brother to him, someone who was fighting a hopeless battle against alcoholism. “It really is an incantation,” he said. “5/8s give it the extra power.” He added, cautiously, that the person is three months dry, and does not know the song exists.
The other song he singled out is “S.A.D.” Fredl wrote the music. Heimo listened to it non-stop for a while, then wrote the lyrics on a longish train ride from Vienna to Schrattenberg in late October, “pretty much how it was.” He does not suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder in a continuous way, but a few times every autumn it hits him hard.
Wyลwietl ten post na Instagramie
“Last Note” comes with six different silk-screen covers, one for each of six untitled drawings Heimo made in 2024 and 2025, ink on paper, roughly 30 by 40 centimeters.
The prints are S.A.D., die Fliegen (a kind of self-portrait), Valse Triste, Big Black Hole (which relates to relativity), This is it, and Golden Age. Heimo says he did not draw them for the record. He picked ones that matched the mood of specific songs, though mostly he wanted them to set an atmosphere.
His drawings, in his own words, “cycle around inner processes, daily occurrences, the news,” and function as a way of trying to understand the world and cope with it.
Sometimes he lets a drawing lead. Sometimes he starts with something to resolve, and the drawing wanders somewhere else entirely.
“Simple statements turn enigmatic, and a surreal, dreamlike beginning leads to a commonplace,” he said. He will not explain the drawings. Some of the songs are political rants and others are personal lamentos, “but they all are incantations, and so it is important to lie a little bit, to misdirect, otherwise the spell might backfire.”
Fugu played a run of shows in Austria around the release: echoraum in Vienna on June 16, Cafe Wolf in Graz on June 18, Black Horse Inn in Wels on June 19, and a June 25 Elektro Guzzi und Fugu (Fuguzi) collaboration at Hoerberatung Wien. One date is still to come. August 8 at Hotel Pupik in Scheifling, on the roof of the same baroque stable where the note went up in 2002.
Fredl has a line about why the band keeps going. The note that said “3 songs by September 2” was written for both of them and it stuck. “We both feel a sense of urgency to keep Fugu going. Why that is remains a mystery.”
๐ IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal ๐๐ SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter ยท Instagram ยท Facebook ยท X (Twitter) ยท Threads ยท Bluesky ยท Messenger ยท WhatsApp.
