FRÄULEIN: “WE’RE A LIVE BAND FIRST AND FOREMOST”
VOCAL GIRLS catches up with Fräulein to discuss their headline show at The Victoria, getting through the pandemic, and the importance of diversifying the alt scene.
Hailing from Northern Ireland and the Netherlands respectively, Fräulein is fronted by Joni on vocals and guitar and Karsten on drums, who synthesise their own brand of alternative rock from a wide pool of influences. Their latest gig was for Get In Her Ears, an organisation that’s championing marginalised genders in music. “I invited two different groups of friends that I hadn’t seen in like six years to come down,” Karsten grins, “it was like a big reunion”. As well as a crowd filled with friendly faces, the show was also a testing ground for new music, with the captivating Joni vocalising over a song that hasn’t found its lyrics yet.
“We came out of the pandemic really ready to go, and we started playing gigs immediately,” Joni says. The Victoria was already their second headline show of the year, having stepped in at the last minute for their friend’s gig at Paper Dress Vintage. “[Hannah] just messaged us on the Saturday morning and was like ‘do you guys wanna play a gig tonight, no worries if you can’t’,” Joni explains, “and we were like ‘we’re not doing anything, let’s just go play a gig’.”
Playing live is clearly Fräulein’s raison d’etre. “Through and through,” Karsten confirms. “‘Cause that’s how we started, that’s how we’ve gained all of our experience, and that’s the thing that we enjoy doing most, absolutely. It’s a really unique experience to play on stage and meet people in this industry who are more often than not really sound, and we just love having those conversations.”
Given how important a live crowd is to these two, it’s surprising that the pandemic wasn’t all bad news. “I would say [it was] a bit of a blessing and a curse,” Karsten muses. “In our first year of being a band we recorded an EP. We got it back and we were a little bit underwhelmed, but we still wanted to press forward with it and release it. Because of the pandemic we had to take a step back and re-evaluate it, and we said to ourselves that this is not the best that we could do.” Joni agrees that the breathing space was actually pretty good for them. “I think one of the pros for us during the pandemic was that we lived really close and Karsten had an outdoor space, so we could practise quite a lot,” she says. “We realised what we wanted to sound like.”
Despite being in the same social bubble (remember those?), it still wasn’t all plain sailing for the pair: “I found it really hard to find things to write about in the pandemic and continue to check in on myself,” Joni admits. “I definitely was getting a bit overwhelmed and I think I’m now only starting to get out of that.” Losing contact with everyday life was certainly hard on their writing process; Joni likens her lyrics to trains of thought, explaining how “every song sets up a problem I’m having or something that I’m observing, and then [the song/lyrics] is me trying to work it out or commenting on that situation.”
Sonically, Fräulein are able to draw on a whole host of musical influences. The pair first met at a jamming session held by a mutual friend: “I promised myself when I graduated university that I would go out and just be in a band,” Joni remembers. “I ended up just meeting Karsten, and then I didn’t end up meeting anyone else that I clicked with.” Their individual music tastes didn’t make them obvious partners, though. “I was a bit more inclined towards math rock and rap, and Joni was definitely more influenced by 90s indie rock at the time,” Karsten explains. “So we just sat down and we just watched, I think, about an hour and a half of YouTube videos and [were] sharing influences and music.” Joni agrees. “Yeah, I think we were coming from wildly different places, but now that we’ve known each other for a long time we definitely have discovered bands together. We’re obsessed with Big Thief, we share that, and there’s so many bands that we both love.”
Now, Karsten explains that Joni is the main songwriter: “she writes the lyrics and the riffs and then she’ll come to me with either a fully formed idea or half of one, and we’ll jam it out a little bit and we’ll see what sticks. Then she’ll go away and make any adjustments that she might want, and then we’ll come back and flesh it out from there.” They managed to find a way around their differing backgrounds, too. “When we first met, Joni played a riff for me that was in a really weird time signature,” Karsten recalls. “It was oddly phrased, and I was like ‘what is that?’.” Joni rejoins, agreeing that “it kind of bridged the gap, the time signature stuff. We didn’t know each other’s influences but we could speak the same language.”
They might be headlining The Victoria and selling out Britxon’s Windmill these days, but a career in music wasn’t always on the cards for Fräulein. “I studied Sociology [at Bath University] and I just finished my Masters at King’s doing Political Economy, so I’ve really been focused on humanitarian causes,” Karsten says. “But music has always been something that’s been there for me.” Joni’s story is pretty similar: “I was twenty one when I started playing guitar, so I was pretty late, and I was twenty one [or] twenty two when I started writing - I’m twenty six now - so it’s very new for me. I did Mechanical Engineering at uni, so I’m a maths person, always been very academic.”
They also had the very relatable problem of needing to win over their families. “Of course, there were always the parents in the background saying ‘this is not a viable career option,’” Karsten grins. “I was fully prepared for it to remain a hobby until I met Joni, and she said that she wanted to give this a proper go.” But even this, as Joni explains, was relatively unplanned: “I think we were just like ‘let’s play a show’ and then it was ‘oh my God, let’s keep playing shows, they’re so fun’ and then it was ‘let’s record a song’, so it was very much building up.”
Part of that build up included a move to London in 2020. “I still love Bristol, I miss Bristol a lot,” Joni admits. “I’m from Ireland as well - to move to London, it’s hectic. But luckily we moved just before the third lockdown, or something?”. Karsten nods in agreement. “So when we moved here everything was closed, so we were just like ‘ooh, London isn’t that expensive, London isn’t that bad, it’s fine!’”, Joni laughs. “But then everything opened and we were like ‘oh’.” They definitely weren’t the only ones.
Extortionate London prices aside, 2020 became an important year for Fräulein. “We hadn’t released anything until [2021] officially,” Joni says. “But [in] 2020, when all of the Black Lives Matter protests were happening, I think we were just like ‘we’re sitting in the house and we can’t do anything about it but we just want to do something’. We decided to self record a demo and put it on Bandcamp, and every time someone would purchase the demo one hundred percent of the proceeds went to the Black Curriculum.” She smiles. “It is a really rough, unready recording. Karsten set up a whole drum kit in his bedroom, and Karsten produced and mixed it all and everything, but Get in Her Ears picked that up. I don’t know how they found it, but they picked it up and wrote about it and they’ve been writing about us ever since.”
Supporting POC voices has remained a top priority for the band: “I think it’s really important to highlight women in music, but not just women in music but women of colour in music,” Joni continues. “Especially alternative music, ‘cause there aren’t many - there are maybe two or three bands I can think of nowadays that are alt POC fronted.” The festival circuit in particular, despite recent discourse, has a long way left to go. “I really think that it’s awful with women in general,” Joni stresses. “There are not many women on festival lineups, but look at the women of colour on festival lineups. They’re not there.”
The duo are witnessing a change, though. “I do find it really heartening to see, especially at a grassroots level, people starting to take [space] up,” Karsten muses. “Some contemporaries that spring to mind are Heartworms, Breakup Haircut, Naz and Ella, English Teacher. Suddenly you’re seeing a larger influx of women of colour being frontwomen and taking up the space that is rightfully theirs, in these scenes which have been predominantly white het cis males’.I do think it’s very important that that space is open to everybody, because that’s what music is for.” Joni agrees: “I think people are having to think about [diverse lineups] because they know they’re gonna get called out,” she adds. “Obviously that’s not the motivation you want, you don’t want people to be like ‘oh no, we have to book these people because we’re gonna get shouted at otherwise’, but it’s still progress at least, you know? Which does something.”
Speaking of the future, it seems like Fräulein have big things planned for 2022. “We do have a larger thing coming out soon, which is really exciting,” Joni teases. “Hopefully that’s going to be announced in the next couple of weeks, maybe a month or so? And that’s really, really cool.” They already have a string of shows lined up for the next few months, including a slot at DIY Alive in April. If their current momentum is anything to go by, they’re soon to become one of the most exciting artists on the alt scene.
Photo Credits: Megan Graye | @megangraye_
