How do you follow-up one of the greatest and most deliciously over the top synth pop albums of all time? Well, that’s a question the founding members of the German and sometimes British collective known as Propaganda have been musing answers to ever since A Secret Wish took the world by storm in 1985.
For the record, A Secret Wish is this author’s favorite studio album of all time, it’s an absolute masterpiece that still sounds ahead of its time nearly 40 years since its release. While the collective behind this goth-tinged synth sonic dragon never reunited, their definitive work remains arguably even more popular today than it was in its triumphant heyday.
Propaganda circa 2024, photo by Thomas Stelzmann
This October, only the third-ever album released under the official Propaganda moniker arrives in record stores, a stirring self-titled record crafted by two of the band’s OG members, Ralf Dorper and Michael Mertens. It follows, and perhaps it’s very existence was a response to, the ascension of xPropaganda, a successful tour, live album, subsequent studio album (2022’s The Heart is Strange), and remix LP (2023’s Strangely) by the rest of the band, vocalists Claudia Brucken and Susanne Freytag and producer Stephen Lipson.
Editor’s Note: Ralf Dorper, Claudia Brucken, and the city of Dusselforf all have umlauts, but for some reason the symbol doesn’t appear to read correctly on WordPress, so they’ve been omitted.
If you can let go of any wishes for A Secret Wish Pt. 2 from either warring faction, you’re in for two very rewarding and emotional sonic journeys. Whereas The Heart is Strange is its own jazzy/poppy beast that expands upon much of Brucken’s solo work, Propaganda the album, is kindred in spirit to the brand’s last outing, 1234 from 1990, so much so a fitting alternative title could have been 5678.
Now you’ll notice I’ve interchanged “brand” and “band” a few times, and that’s by design, as both parties appeal to fans of the original collective, but neither group sails in the blustery, uncharted, high seas of the mid-80’s. The reason is simple; while the five principal musical provocateurs (co-founder Andreas Thien passed in 2013) are back in the studio across these two projects, some key players and elements remain missing.
A Secret Wish was perhaps ZTT Records’ most ambitious project. Under the creative leadership of producer Trevor Horn (The Buggles), journalist Paul Morley (NME), and business visionary Jill Sinclair, ZTT (zang tumb tumb, the sound a machine gun makes) shook up the otherwise puritanical decade with the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Art of Noise, plus Grace Jones, Seal, and 808 State. Countless other core and auxiliary musicians, producers, engineers, inventors, graphic designers, publicists, and marketers collaborated on the project.
The music, remixes, photography, and record sleeves supporting A Secret Wish were brash, menacing, weird, unpredictable, dark, bright, bold, and in your face. Paul Morley peppered provocative sleeve designs by the London Design Partnership with WTF quotations, phrases, and easter eggs. Menacing and flamboyant band images (many by Anton Corbijn) evoked gothic cinema and high fashion. Most importantly, Dorper and Mertens pushed synths to the absolute limit – instead of providing rhythmic wallpaper to a vocal performance, keys and computers blazed in the mixes like stadium-conquering rock stars, a coke-fueled orchestra, the horn section in hell, and an Andy Warhol fever dream all in one. Propaganda’s alumni kept releasing great music, but never again tapped into that ambition.
Rumors style in-fighting consumed the band and Brucken soon left to form Act with Thomas Leer. By the time Mertens signed with Virgin Records for the 1990 follow-up, 1234, most everyone was gone, though Freytag and Dorper participated to some degree, as did David Gilmour and Howard Jones. 1234 was a lovely record, even though pop replaced provocation and minimalism replaced maximalism – both on the sleeves and in the mixes. Betsi Miller took over main vocals, and the overall vibe was more Cathy Dennis and than Lene Lovich.
The band was quiet for much of the past 30 years, but the brand was busy re-releasing countless variations on A Secret Wish, including two full-on remix albums (Wishful Thinking and Outside World), an expanded deluxe edition, and countless appearances on a variety of ZTT box sets (pictured below second row). ACT’s sole album, Laughter, Tears, and Rage, was the closest the world ever got to A Second Wish, as Lipson, Morley and a similar design ethos helped craft a brash and pretentious (in all the best uses of the word) indictment of the “Greed is Good” decade. That album has since seen 2 and 3-disc expansions. The spirit of ZTT and Propaganda also live on in the extensive discography of The Art of Noise.
PURE (Propaganda Universe: Radically Expansive) is my shorthand umbrella to cover all of these variations. And this is where we find Propaganda, the band and the album, in 2024.
The Earthly world that welcomes Propaganda back into pop culture is as unstable and volatile in 2024 as it was when the band first broke onto the scene. Back then, it was the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher, economic disparity and fear of nuclear war permeated our daily lives. The name Propaganda harkened back to the rise of fascism in Germany and the Russian media under the grip of Gorbachev. By the time Propaganda, the album, lands in October of 2024, the US will be on the doorstep of an election that very well might end our democracy experiment. Further ticking the doomsday clock closer to midnight, Putin and Ukraine, Bibi and Gaza, fascism under the guise of nationalism is gaining traction on every continent, Brexit, Fox News, Global Warming, Space Debris and countless other threats. At least Far Right movements were kept at bay this summer in France and the UK.
Once again, Propaganda provides us all with a momentary respite from the chaos – it’s a sleek and seductive escape to an outside world. Much like its predecessor, the new album is dreamy, gorgeous and reserved. The artwork is minimal, the tunes elegant and entrancing.
Rising star Thunder Bae takes the mic this time around, adding her dark, brooding and sensual vocals to the legacies of Brucken, Freytag, and Miller. Bae already has a lot of singles in the streamerverse and is ideally suited to headline the types of sci-fi and supernatural scores modern DJs craft for video games, films, and Gacha Life videos. Oscar-nominated composer and pianist Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann) adds lush instrumentation to the otherwise synthetic landscape Propaganda is infamous for.
Kickoff track, ‘They Call Me Nocebo’, at first nods to the minimalism of fellow Dusselforf legends Kraftwerk and Thomas Dolby’s overlooked computer animation soundtrack, The Gate to the Mind’s Eye (1994), before welcoming Bae to center stage. First single, ‘Purveyors of Pleasure’ ups the ante, and while the lyric video plays out like a PowerPoint presentation, the more we see of Bae, the band, and some signature bold graphics and obtuse cinematography down the road, the better this version of the brand will catch on.
Next comes a re-imagining of ‘Vicious Circle’ from 1234, the only reason I can think this remake exists is to burn the one bridge (Susanne Freytag’s guest vocals), that connected that album and era to A Secret Wish. Propaganda picks up momentum through the middle act with album highlights (‘Tipping Point’, ‘Distant’, and ‘Love.Craft’) that mix bubblier sound beds with darker lyrics and in many ways recall another one-off synth pop masterpiece by Alice Deejay. Propaganda fades to black with two film score style songs that honor Mertens lengthy career in that arena. Instrumental ‘Dystopian Waltz’ takes you so far beyond the realm of what just was, you forget you were even listening to a Propaganda album in the first place. Side 2 closer, ‘Wenn Ich Mir Was Wuenschen Duerfte’, plays like a steampunk time trip, at first alluding to ‘Moments in Love’ by the Art of Noise, before blossoming into a lovely cover of a German standard from the thirties, written by Friedrich Hollaender and previously revisited in the 1960’s by Marlene Dietrich.
According to record label Bureau B, a few more tracks will follow on a limited edition Disc 2 – ‘Not Good For You’, ‘Solace In Sin’, ‘World Out Of Joint’, ‘I Feel Mysterious’, and ‘The Calling’. We’re told these songs are reimaginings of tracks from Disc 1, which is on par for the brand.
So to sum up Propaganda circa 2024, while it’s nothing like A Secret Wish, it is a bold and gorgeous work of modern art, one that I look forward to buying on CD (deluxe edition of course) to add to my beloved collection. The production and vocals should appeal to fans of 1234 while welcoming a new generation of faithful aligned to the reigning queens of avant disco and darkwave pop, Tove Lo, Sky Ferreria, Suki Waterhouse, and Charli XCX. Worth noting — Charli recently dropped Brat, a masterful synth banger tour de force, that along with her sterling debut, True Romance, carries the A Secret Wish torch for a new generation.
Epilogue:
Having discovered the WordPress update umlaut debacle (which also wreaked havoc on capital letters for whatever reason), I went back and cleaned up two must-read POPDOSE interviews with Claudia Brucken.
In this interview from 2014 to promote her album …where else?, Claudia takes us on a guided tour throughout her careers with Propaganda, ACT, OneTwo, and her expansive solo catalog.
In this interview from 2018, Claudia is joined by Jerome Froese from Tangerine Dream to discuss their collaboration, Beginn.
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