As Electric Callboy suit up for their new Technicolor odyssey TANZNEID, we head to Boston for an exclusive interview with frontmen Kevin and Nico to get a glimpse into their ever-expanding universe and find out why everyone is finally on board with their unique brand of heaviness...
It’s a very hot almost-summer afternoon in Boston, and there’s a non-stop swarm of people walking to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, the city’s major league baseball team, who are playing the Baltimore Orioles. Just before you get to the stadium, however, there’s another group of people lining up. This lot don’t have baseball jerseys on, but band T-shirts, and they’re waiting outside the nearby MGM Music Hall at Fenway – a mouthful of a name like most Stateside venues these days – for something very different: the last show of the U.S. leg of Electric Callboy’s TANZNEID World Tour. TANZNEID, in case you’re wondering, is the name of the band’s forthcoming seventh album. More on that later.
Inside the 5,000-capacity venue itself, people behind the scenes are busy getting ready for the evening’s festivities. Security teams are being briefed, and merch tables set up. Doors aren’t open yet, but there’s a group of excited fans who bought VIP tickets that, laminates dangling proudly from their necks, are taking a sneak peek at the shirts that will be on offer later that evening.
Upstairs, in the sizeable backstage complex, there’s a large common space housing a Led Zeppelin-themed pinball machine, and two smaller rooms. Behind one door marked ‘Electric Callboy’ the German band’s two frontmen – unclean vocalist Kevin Ratajczak, who co-founded the band in 2010, and his clean-throated counterpart Nico Sallach, who joined the ranks a full decade later, replacing original vocalist Sebastian Biesler – are sitting on a plush leather sofa and enjoying the refreshing breeze of the room’s A/C. Or at least that’s what you’d expect them to be doing. In reality, the room is warm and stuffy. For which the pair are incredibly apologetic.
“Sorry,” they say in unison before tripping over each other to explain why, in what feels oddly like a comedy skit.
“We are turning off the A/C whenever we enter a room because out voices aren’t used to it,” says Nico.
“It’s fucking unbelievable,” agrees Kevin. “Japan and the United States are going crazy with their A/Cs. When you go to Arizona or in the south somewhere and it's nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, and inside…”
“…they turned it back to 68!” emphasises Nico.
“Or even lower!” Kevin jumps in. “You have to wear a jacket. There’s such a huge gap it makes no sense.”
“All the air from the A/C is actually drying our voices so bad,” says Nico. “So whenever we come back to the U.S., in the first couple of days, we actually have to get used to it again.”
“I’m always wearing long pants,” says Kevin, who is, indeed, wearing black jeans and a loose-fitting black T-shirt, “and…”
“No,” says Nico, interrupting his bandmate. “Whenever it gets hot outside, I’m in my short pants.”
He is, indeed, wearing short pants.
The exchange is a brief but fascinating insight into the dynamic between the two frontmen who are obviously close friends. They share the same sense of humour, they finish off each other’s sentences. Onstage, they complement each other perfectly.
And they are, quite rightly, on top of the world. This tour has been a total success and practically sold out every night, there’s the highly-anticipated new album, TANZNEID, on the horizon, and they’re hitting new levels of critical and commercial success that previously eluded them for a hell of a long time.
In fact, before Nico joined the band in 2020, things hadn’t been all that great. The band were – to put it mildly – seen as something of a joke because they like to dress up in silly costumes and make amusing video. The view was that they didn’t take themselves seriously. They want the music they make to be fun so that the people listening to it, especially live, also have fun. That attitude, of course, earned Electric Callboy their fair share of haters. There was also significant internal friction that made it the opposite of what they wanted it to be: unfun.
“I wasn't in the band before, so I don't know how the vibe was,” says Nico, “I know now because we've talked about it, but all I can say is that the energy that was missing beforehand just came back because we have a good dynamic. When it comes to writing new songs or working together, it just feels easy and it feels natural and we never have that feeling. Well, I wouldn't say never because when you're shooting a video for three days it feels like work. But we never had that feeling of, 'It's work.’”
“Take a band as a company,” adds Kevin in slightly off-kilter English. “It's nearly the same. If you want to go really professional and make it your job, you have to be acting sometimes like it's a company. And when you're passionate about what you're doing, in the beginning it takes a lot. You have to put much into it and you just get little out of it. That's normal with every business. But the more passion and the more work and more effort you put into it, the people start to acknowledge it. Before Nico joined our band, it felt a little bit like not all forces in the band went in the same direction.”
“This is not about being guilty or not,” he continues, clearly not wanting to throw anyone under the bus. “It's more like there were five in the band that wanted the same, and one that didn't want the same, and in the end it was pulling in different directions. But when Nico joined just before the pandemic, that easiness to just go into the studio and make music for the fun of it came back.”
“When Nico joined, the ability to just go into the studio and make music for the fun of it came back”
Fun. It’s a word that crops up a lot. It's a word the band – completed by lead guitarist Daniel Haniß, bassist Daniel Klossek, guitarist Pascal Schillo and, on this tour, Sum 41’s Frank Zummo behind the kit – really endeavour to bring to life onstage. They succeed. It’s not just a concert. It’s a spectacle.
For almost two hours, they treat each song they play – and there are 20 of them – like its own mini universe. Each one has its own unique visual style thanks to incredibly detailed, all-consuming projections. There are costume changes, pyrotechnics, explosions of confetti, a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting, an acoustic interlude played from the middle of the room, and even a drum solo/duet, which sees Frank play with a giant, sinister-looking four-armed robot that appears on the screen behind him. Immediately after that, there’s a high-octane DJ set from the band’s Electric Bassboy alter-ego that includes an EDM-ified version of blink-182’s All The Small Things. It’s ridiculous, it’s wonderful, it’s impressive, it’s hilarious, it’s brilliant.
That’s not all, either. When the band launch into RATATATA, their hit with kawaii-metal titans BABYMETAL, giant avatars of the Japanese band appear onscreen behind the Germans to sing and dance along. Interestingly and unusually, even though that track was released on BABYMETAL’s 2025 album, Metal Forth, it’s also included on TANZNEID. The topic of this international collaboration leads to another spirited exchange between the two frontmen where they talk almost as if they’re one person, constantly finishing each other’s sentences.
“We worked on that song, both bands 50 per cent,” says Kevin, “and it was one of the most challenging and most enriching collaborations that we ever had.”
“Usually with feature tracks,” chimes in Nico, “you’re writing a song and someone’s doing a part, or someone’s writing a song for you and you’re doing your part.”
“And you don’t question it much,” says Kevin.
“But this time, we had to do things and accept things we normally wouldn’t do. Never.”
“And that sounds so bad. That sounds a little bit negative.”
“I mean, at that moment,” clarifies Nico, “it was not easy for us. We were sitting there, like, ‘No fucking way. No. We can't do it, we just can't.’ But then we were talking to them and then we figured out a good way to do it, and that’s what makes the song so special.”
Another special song on TANZNEID is Let The Good Times Roll, a reworking of the title track from The Offspring’s 2021 album Let The Bad Times Roll, which was made in partnership with the legendary Californian punks. They’re a band that Electric Callboy have loved for a long time. As Kevin puts it, “this was one of the bands that made us buy a guitar and shred the riffs.” So when, at Belgium’s Graspop Metal Meeting festival, Electric Callboy got word, via their crew, that The Offspring wanted to meet them, they were slightly nervous.
“We were like, ‘Oh shit! Oh fuck! It can’t be true. Did we do something wrong?!’ We didn’t know,” remembers Kevin, who two years prior at Switzerland’s Greenfield Festival had taken a “fanboy selfie” with Dexter Holland. “But they arranged this meeting and they came over and said, ’We love your music, can we watch from the side of the stage?’”
From that came the song feature and a video shoot, where, once again, Electric Callboy were stunned at how down-to-earth and easy to work with the singer was.
“When you're meeting your idols – or bands or artists that you fell in love with when you were a child basically – it's just so crazy,” beams Nico. “I know that these guys made so many funny music videos, but I couldn't really believe that he's down for doing funny stuff with us. He’s one of my heroes, so I don't want to ask him to act like a goofball in one of our music videos. But he was like, 'Dude! Let's go!'”
“As soon as I'm offstage, I'm one of you. I don't want to be on a podium”
It's yet another indication of how far Electric Callboy have come, and how deeply their specific brand of electronicore has started to penetrate. While global stardom isn’t unheard of for a German band – just ask Kraftwerk or Rammstein – it’s still relatively rare. But watching Electric Callboy take Boston by storm and seeing the entire crowd respond so effusively, it really does feel that they’re on the cusp of becoming global superstars. Not if you ask Kevin and Nico, though. Even when it’s unfolding right in front of them, even when they have 5,000 Bostonians eating out of the palm of their hands, the pair remain incredibly humble.
“No, no, no, no, no!” they both protest at the label together.
“We’re pretty well-known,” clarifies Nico.
“In the scene,” double-clarifies Kevin.
“I would never call ourselves this,” adds Nico. “Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga – they couldn’t say no to that, but we’re not on that level.”
The conversation then turns to how – even at this level – the pair feel awkward (though very grateful) when they interact with fans, and see how much their music means to them, because they haven’t let any of this go to their heads.
“When we meet people in front of the bus, sometimes they have shaky hands and you see they're excited,” says Kevin. “It makes me feel so uncomfortable. When we're onstage and we're doing the show, we're just us. We're being authentic, but we're there to make the show. But as soon as I'm offstage, I'm one of you. I'm not the entertainer anymore, talk to me like any other person. I don't want to be on a podium.”
TANZNEID, then. You pronounce it – more or less – like this: Tahns Znyde. It’s not a real German word, but like so many real German words, it’s a composite noun, two (or more) words brought together to create a new meaning. Essentially, it translates as ‘dance’ (tanz) ‘envy’ (neid). It was coined by the band’s friend Uke, who played the lead role in the video for Elevator Operator. While on set, he determined that that’s what the band had while they waited for their moment to dance in the video.
“When we decided to take this as our album title,” smiles Kevin, “all the office people around us were like ‘Oh, you can't do that. That’s going to confuse people. They won't know how to pronounce it!’”
“Which is actually the funny thing about it,” offers Nico. “It shows our German roots, first of all”
Indeed, it would be absolutely fitting if an album with a made-up German word is what properly propels Electric Callboy into the mainstream. Because this is a band who have always done things their own way – like naming an album a word that people can’t pronounce – and who have weathered the storm for doing so. But doing so has afforded them the luxury of creative freedom. They don’t have to fit into any pigeonholes – they can just make whatever the hell kind of music they want and let the fans and the wider world come to them.
“We have complete freedom,” grins Kevin. “We wake up in the morning and decide, for example, to mix a boyband song with a deathcore ending, you know? We have found our way of making music. When we started, it wasn't always like that. It was very chaotic. And I think this is just the evolution in every band, that you try out things and you experiment.”
“I think the biggest example that we always have is actually Metallica,” says Nico. “That's a band everybody knows on this planet. But they couldn't do what we are doing. Just imagine the next album they're coming up with is a mixture of heavy guitar riffs and EDM. Most of their fans would be like 'What the hell?!'”
Of course, people have been saying ‘What the hell?!’ – usually in a derogatory way – about Electric Callboy for a long time. Now, though, it seems they’re having the last laugh. Because they’ve built up a fanbase by making fun-loving, euphoric music that, judging from the crowd’s response in Boston, truly makes people feel alive. Or, rather, happy to feel alive. That’s surely one of the reasons it resonates so well – because you can lose yourself in their music for almost two hours and come away with a slightly lighter heart about the state of the world.
“Metallica couldn't do what we are doing”
Yet while it’s mostly a joyous experience – even the most cynical cynic would be hard-pressed not to enjoy the band’s live show – there’s still plenty of substance beneath the electro-thumping, fist-pumping, ear-shredding surface. There is, for example, a song called Heartclub on TANZNEID that deals with what Kevin calls “the superficiality of social media. [The song is] still using a funny language, but it has a serious topic.”
There’s also two other songs – Still Waiting and The Savior – that show even Electric Callboy aren’t immune to or unaffected by the horrors of the world.
“Do you know the movie Idiocracy?” asks Nico of the 2006 science-fiction comedy, which depicts a dystopian anti-intellectual society. “That was the feeling we had when writing The Savior.”
Mostly though, these songs are designed to make everybody in the crowd feel better, like the wonderful nonsense of Elevator Operator. It was literally inspired by someone in Chicago, Nico explains, “standing in the elevator all day, playing his playlist.” They asked him what his job was and he said, “I’m the Elevator Operator”.
“We had the melody in our hands already when he said that,” continues Nico. “What you hear in the song came right there.”
Live, that song is a pure explosion of visceral feel-goodness. But then, everything they play that evening is delivered with the same kind of joie de vivre that carries the entire show. It makes for a real sense of unity in the audience – a shared experience that the people who were there will remember for a long time indeed.
After the gig is over, the crowds from the baseball stadium and the venue merge on the walk back into the city. The Red Sox beat the Orioles 8-0, so the baseball fans are buzzing as much as the Electric Callboy crowd. But the real winners, obviously, are Electric Callboy. It’s taken them a lifetime to get here, but they have most definitely arrived. What’s more, they’re here to stay.
Pre-order your limited-edition Electric Callboy x Kerrang! printed zine now.
TANZNEID is released August 7 via Century Media.
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