Kater’s debut had a bit of an identity problem, and they’ll be the first to tell you. Three-quarters of the band came out of Ivanca — an indie-leaning outfit with a different frontman (still a friend, no bad blood) — and when that project wrapped, the remaining three had to figure out what they actually sounded like without the old context. Koop took over vocals for the first time. They experimented. “It was fun but resulted in a loosely connected collection of songs,” he says. Their 2022 debut “The Great Idea of Leaving” carried electronic elements and indie leanings — interesting stuff, but scattered.
The second record is a different animal. “Into Thin Air,” out April 10 via Fuego, is louder, more direct, and a whole lot darker. Eleven tracks that lean on the ’90s grunge, shoegaze, and post-rock they all grew up on — Oceansize, Amplifier, Dredg, Failure, the whole early Seattle universe — while deliberately stripping back the electronic touches.
“We sometimes feel there could be more simplicity and edginess in the music scene regarding songwriting and production,” Koop explains. They mean it. The album opens with “Slipping Away” setting the pace immediately, and doesn’t really let up from there.
A big part of what changed was Finn Stockmann. Bringing in a second guitarist wasn’t just about getting heavier — it shifted the entire writing dynamic. Denser arrangements, more textural push and pull, more willingness to break with convention. The band gained another creative brain, and you can hear it in how tightly the songs are built compared to the debut.
Here’s the thing about Kater in 2026: they’re fully aware that putting out an album — a proper, sequenced, eleven-song long player — is commercially kind of a dumb move. No drip-feed single strategy, no content calendar, no artificial campaigns. Just the record, all at once.
“For us, releasing an entire album is a statement: this is a breaking point, this is who we are now,” Koop says. “We thought a long player stresses this more than a collection of single releases. We think there is more to say in a cohesive collection of songs.”
The tracks were all written in a fairly tight window, which makes the whole thing feel like a snapshot — who these people are right now, not a highlight reel assembled over years. “There is a certain nostalgia in releasing an album. We all remember waiting for the next album of a band, wondering what it would sound like, what it would have to say, how we would perceive it. Art takes time, so does consuming and reflecting on it.” They know a constant stream of output is the way the game works now. They know the risk. “But this feels more authentic to us.”
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The record covers a lot of ground. “For A Spell” — the first single, out since March 20 — deals with mortality and a growing sense of indifference, unmistakably shaped by that early ’90s Seattle sound.
“The Glass” goes somewhere harder to talk about: the fear of losing the ability to speak, watching things happen to relatives and projecting those events onto your own life. “In Circles” takes the grind of repetition and makes it claustrophobic — same day, same process, different people cycling through it in a work context. All three of those sit squarely in the grunge-influenced side of the album, with clear ’90s reference points.
Then there’s the weirder stuff. “The Tide” is built on odd time signatures and spacey, drifting sounds — an inner journey marked by isolation and disorientation, a sense of having no way back. “I Should Know” lives in similar experimental territory, about growing as a person while life stubbornly refuses to cooperate with your plans.
The title track, “Into Thin Air,” is the quietest thing here — almost floating at first, minimal and patient, before it builds into something powerful. Koop compares it to classic Oceansize tracks. Lyrically, it’s about mortality again, and about the lie that time heals. “Time is mostly declared as a healing factor,” he says, “but it’s often just about forgetting.” “Echoes” delivers one of the album’s most memorable moments with an anthemic finale. “Slipping Away,” “Wrong,” “Floras Lake,” and “Cut These Ties” fill out the rest of the tracklist.
There’s even some hardcore and emo bleeding through. The band talks about their writing as chasing dynamic changes — every good story needs both the big loud moments and the quiet, sad parts that hit you somewhere specific. “We tried to bring together all of our ideas, styles, and feelings.”
The thread that runs through the lyrics is fragility and self-doubt — not as some permanent state of being, but as the feeling of constantly facing new, unknown challenges in a world that keeps getting more tangled. On a personal level, health stuff — their own and people close to them — moved closer during the making of this record. “Kater serves as our release valve,” Koop says. The state of the world seeps in too. “We think there are many insecurities that haven’t been there when we were younger, but also the world changed — mostly not for the good.”
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Bremen’s music scene is small but tight in a way that bigger cities sometimes aren’t. There’s no genre-locked underground community — it’s more that everyone keeps showing up at each other’s gigs, crossing between metal, indie, alternative, surf rock, electronic, jazz.
“On release shows of bands from Bremen you end up meeting all those other Bremen musicians, which is cool because it feels like the music scene stands together and is really supportive.”
Key spots: HarborInn Studios (where the album was recorded and the “For A Spell” video was shot), the Zentrale (release show venue), Musikszene Bremen for rehearsal rooms and events, the Tower, Lagerhaus, and Eisen. Bands from their orbit worth checking out: Pafero, Dramatist, We Had to Leave, Wrong Chat, Phantom Bay, Tied, Below Zero, No Comfort.
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“Into Thin Air” is out April 10 via Fuego.
