Diagram: Berlin Duo Announces ‘Short Circuit Control’ Album and New Single

Emerging from the underground contours of Berlin’s ever-shifting music scene, Diagram has carved an idiosyncratic path through the city’s moody terrain of post-punk, electronica, and neo-psychedelia. Founded by the Icelandic musician Hákon Aðalsteinsson—known for his work with The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Third Sound—the project took root as a solitary endeavour, defined by its stark aesthetics and atmospheric layers. Over time, Diagram matured into a fuller sonic organism with the addition of Danish drummer Fred Sunesen, whose rhythmic presence lent live resonance and textural weight to the recordings. Together, they fashioned a sound that is brooding yet lucid, ethereal yet grounded, with Berlin’s raw cultural landscape serving as both backdrop and incubator for their creative process.

In 2025, Diagram returns with ‘Short Circuit Control,’ a new full-length album scheduled for release on April 25 under the Berlin-based P.U.G. Records. Announced through their official channels, the album signals a continuation—and perhaps a deepening—of their atmospheric signature, pairing analog melancholia with a pulsing electronic undercurrent. Alongside the album comes their latest single, ‘Sunday Morning,’ an enigmatic track that tempers lyrical introspection with motorik rhythm and cinematic restraint. Both releases position Diagram not only as purveyors of Berlin’s darker sonic impulses but also as contributors to a broader European tradition of avant-garde pop sensibility filtered through modern disquiet.

Origins and Identity

Diagram’s origins are rooted in both solitude and displacement. Icelandic musician Hákon Aðalsteinsson, long immersed in the spectral contours of experimental rock, relocated to Berlin after earning recognition in Reykjavík’s alternative circuit and abroad as a member of The Third Sound and a touring guitarist for The Brian Jonestown Massacre. His previous work, grounded in vintage textures and psych-influenced sprawl, provided the scaffolding for what would become Diagram—a project stripped of excess, introspective in tone, and methodically sparse in execution.

Berlin, with its legacy of permissive experimentation and post-industrial detachment, proved fertile ground for Aðalsteinsson’s shift toward modular synthesis and minimalist arrangement. Diagram began as a studio-based pursuit, exploring emotional absence and mechanical routine through analog tones and tonal decay. Its early output drew upon the aesthetics of Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, and early electronic minimalism—acts that favored mood over melody and structure over spectacle. The city’s underground scene—intimate, texturally minded, and unapologetically nonlinear—embraced Diagram’s inward-looking sound, and the project quickly found resonance in dimly lit art spaces and clubs that prioritize ambiance over performance.

The transition from solitary experimentation to collaborative performance occurred with the arrival of Danish drummer Fred Sunesen. Known in Copenhagen’s experimental and improvisational circles, Sunesen brought an acute sense of spatial rhythm that both anchored and expanded Diagram’s sonic frame. His style, deliberately dry and often indistinguishable from programmed rhythm, blurred the boundaries between human precision and machine logic. In live performances, he introduced a tactile intensity to Aðalsteinsson’s emotionally elusive compositions, allowing Diagram to evolve from a solitary meditation into a compelling, atmospheric duo.

Together, they forged a sound that is emotionally restrained but tonally rich—a fusion of minimalist post-punk and ambient coldwave where vocals sink beneath the surface and repetition carries narrative weight. Their collaborative chemistry rests in their shared aversion to embellishment. Every element is placed with intent, and silence is treated not as absence, but as sonic material. If Berlin offers a sanctuary for music that resists immediacy, Diagram has quietly become one of its most articulate occupants: an ensemble that trades volume for presence, clarity for mood, and nostalgia for a distinctly modern kind of alienation.

Album: ‘Short Circuit Control’ (2025)

Scheduled for release on April 25 through Berlin’s independent label P.U.G. Records, ‘Short Circuit Control’ marks Diagram’s most conceptually cohesive and sonically expansive work to date. Available via digital platforms including Bandcamp, the album builds upon the moody architecture of their previous efforts while embracing a sharper narrative arc and more refined production values. In an era where musical output is often consumed in fragmented singles and algorithmic playlists, Diagram’s choice to assemble a full-length album with thematic continuity is both a creative statement and a quiet defiance of the industry’s prevailing norms.

At its core, ‘Short Circuit Control’ meditates on the tension between mechanized existence and emotional volatility, drawing on imagery that evokes disconnection, malfunction, and digital estrangement. The title itself operates on dual levels—referring both to electrical disruption and a psychological state in which control falters under emotional strain. Tracks unfold like dim corridors in an abandoned facility, echoing with minimalist synth pulses, dissonant textures, and a sense of restrained urgency. While not overtly conceptual, the album carries a discernible narrative weight, tracing the uneasy rhythms of modern life where intimacy is mediated through devices and permanence feels increasingly illusory.

The production of ‘Short Circuit Control’ reflects Diagram’s continued preference for tactile, hands-on recording methods. Captured in Berlin’s Studio H2O—a modest environment known for its vintage instrumentation—the sessions were directed by Aðalsteinsson, with Sunesen shaping the rhythmic framework in ways that were later reshaped to align with the album’s fractured design. Eschewing polished perfection, the pair favored organic takes over digitally mediated layering, resulting in a sound that feels both immediate and quietly meticulous.

By anchoring their latest release in both thematic intent and sonic precision, Diagram has delivered a record that feels both of its time and curiously out of step with it. ‘Short Circuit Control’ neither panders to nostalgia nor chases trends; instead, it offers a kind of haunting stasis—a soundtrack for a world suspended between technological anxiety and human fragility.

Single: ‘Sunday Morning’

Released in early 2025 as the lead single from Diagram’s forthcoming album, ‘Sunday Morning’ made its debut across all major digital platforms, including Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. Quietly introduced through the band’s social media channels and independent press outlets, the track signaled not only a continuation of Diagram’s austere sound but also a subtle shift in tone—one that embraces a more structured melodic form without abandoning the atmospheric severity that has come to define their aesthetic.

‘Sunday Morning’ unfolds with mechanical steadiness, its metronomic beat tracing a lineage to krautrock and coldwave without mimicking either. Lean synthesizers and subdued guitar lines shape the song’s sparse architecture, leaving room for tonal interplay rather than melodic excess. Its production, while precise, resists studio slickness; every sound feels close to the surface, unfiltered, and quietly insistent.

The song presents a stark portrait of disillusionment masked by routine. Despite its title, ‘Sunday Morning’ eschews the tranquility or reverence often associated with the phrase, offering instead a meditation on inertia, isolation, and the numbing repetition of time. Lines are delivered with a resigned flatness, as though the narrator is observing their own life from behind a pane of frosted glass. The Sunday morning in question is not one of renewal but of stasis—a temporal placeholder where nothing is resolved and everything remains suspended. In this way, the song functions less as a narrative than as a mood piece, capturing the uneasy stillness of contemporary existence in its most mundane and quietly devastating form.

Initial reception to ‘Sunday Morning’ has been modest but notably reverent within the circles that have followed Diagram’s evolution. Independent critics and niche music blogs have praised the single for its restraint and atmospheric coherence, noting its ability to conjure emotional depth without recourse to dramatic gestures. Streaming metrics have reflected a slow but steady engagement, typical for a project that has never relied on viral reach or algorithmic amplification. Rather than seeking mass appeal, Diagram continues to cultivate a small but discerning audience attuned to the subtleties of mood-driven music. In that regard, ‘Sunday Morning’ functions exactly as intended: not as a chart-climbing single, but as a distilled expression of the sensibility that undergirds ‘Short Circuit Control’ as a whole.

Music History and Local Scene

Berlin’s underground music scene has long operated as a countercurrent to the city’s institutionalized cultural identity, favoring intimacy, transgression, and impermanence over the commodification often associated with more mainstream European capitals, and within this diffuse ecosystem, Diagram has claimed a quiet but resonant presence.

Their contribution to the Berlin scene is marked not by volume or ubiquity but by atmosphere and precision. Rather than occupying the traditional venues that cater to electronic maximalism or retro nostalgia, Diagram has gravitated toward smaller, sonically attentive spaces—galleries, abandoned venues, and independent clubs where silence is as essential as sound. Their music, steeped in a minimalist ethic and filtered through analog hardware, mirrors the tonal bleakness and introspective intimacy that Berlin’s post-industrial aura fosters. As such, they function as both a product of the city’s underground lineage and a reflective surface for its more subdued, psychologically charged undercurrents.

From a genre standpoint, Diagram exists in a liminal territory shaped by decades of musical entropy. Their sound carries traces of coldwave and early synth-pop, yet it forgoes the melodic immediacy that often defines those genres in favor of structural dissonance and emotional opacity. There is a clear inheritance from late-1970s electronic pioneers such as Suicide and the early works of Kraftwerk, whose motorik pulses and synthetic detachment find a spectral echo in Diagram’s compositions. Yet, their aesthetic restraint places them in a lineage closer to contemporary European minimalists—artists such as Lebanon Hanover, Boy Harsher, or Tropic of Cancer—who have resisted the theatrical flourishes of synth nostalgia in favor of distilled tension and textural depth.

What distinguishes Diagram within this constellation is their disinterest in nostalgia as either an affect or a marketing tool. While many acts in Berlin’s post-punk or coldwave resurgence lean heavily on visual pastiche and stylistic quotation, Diagram’s approach remains stubbornly present-tense. Their sound does not seek to resurrect an era but to document a mood—rooted in the here and now, yet informed by a cultural memory of alienation and technological unease. In doing so, they offer a distinct contribution to Berlin’s ever-evolving underground: music that is quiet but not passive, detached but not indifferent, and as structurally spare as the city’s derelict venues that continue to foster such sonic experiments.

Conclusion

Diagram’s quiet evolution from a solitary studio endeavor into a fully formed artistic entity reflects a broader tendency within Berlin’s underground to privilege sustained craft over rapid ascent. Rather than seek visibility through digital virality or curated festival circuits, the duo has cultivated a sensibility rooted in patience, texture, and mood—an approach that has allowed them to grow organically within a scene that respects the slow burn of artistic development. Their trajectory, marked by aesthetic consistency and thematic clarity, suggests a future in which Diagram remains unhurried by the tempo of the broader music industry, choosing instead to deepen the introspective terrain they have carved for themselves.

With ‘Short Circuit Control’ on the horizon and ‘Sunday Morning’ already gaining modest but focused attention, Diagram’s current momentum suggests a widening interest that does not ask them to dilute their essence. The early reception has highlighted the clarity of their sonic direction—subtle but deliberate, distinct without spectacle—and positions them among Europe’s more disciplined practitioners of mood-driven music.

Their contribution to Berlin’s vibrant and often chaotic musical landscape is not one of volume, but of tone. In a city long known for its sonic excesses and transgressive extremes, Diagram offers a counterpoint: music that whispers rather than shouts, that reflects rather than reacts. Rather than contend with the city’s noise, Diagram inhabits its quieter spaces, drawing focus to the overlooked intervals between sound and sentiment. In doing so, they illuminate a lesser-seen thread in Berlin’s musical identity—one that regards stillness as substance and introspection not as withdrawal, but as an act of subtle connection.

As ‘Short Circuit Control’ nears its release, we welcome your reflections. How does Diagram’s understated soundscape align with your perception of Berlin’s shifting musical identity—or speak to your own relationship with silence and restraint in an increasingly clamorous world? Join the conversation.