NNHMN: ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’ Sets the Stage for a New Darkwave Chapter

Berlin’s thriving underground has long served as a crucible for electronic experimentation, and few acts have embodied its seductive darkness quite like NNHMN. The enigmatic duo, composed of Polish-born artists Lee Margot and Michal Laudarg, has steadily carved their niche within the city’s vast sonic underworld, drawing listeners into shadowy corridors of sound that echo both intimacy and unease. Their forthcoming release, ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I,’ due out on May 28, 2025, promises to deepen this immersive aesthetic.

With its evocative title and thematic leanings toward the melancholic and the sensual, the album marks a new chapter in NNHMN’s unfolding narrative—a narrative defined by emotional vulnerability cloaked in analog synthesizers and cinematic textures. As anticipation builds within Berlin’s nocturnal subculture and beyond, ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’ seems poised not only to reaffirm the band’s distinct voice but also to challenge the boundaries of contemporary darkwave.

From Poland to the Shadows of Berlin

Before NNHMN became synonymous with Berlin’s darkwave renaissance, its origins were rooted in a strikingly different cultural context. The duo—comprised of vocalist and lyricist Lee Margot and producer Michal Laudarg—hail from Poland, where their early creative expressions were shaped by contrasting artistic disciplines. Margot, whose voice now glides over brooding synths with spectral clarity, was once an actress immersed in the discipline and dramaturgy of municipal theatre. Her performances, shaped by the emotional rigor of the stage, would later inform the haunting delivery that defines NNHMN’s sonic identity.

Laudarg, by contrast, emerged from the world of electronic nightlife, cutting his teeth as a techno DJ in Poland’s club circuit. His fascination with hardware synthesisers and modular sounds eventually diverged from the hedonistic pulse of techno and steered toward darker, more introspective terrain. Seeking a deeper resonance with their artistic ambitions, the pair relocated to Berlin—a city whose permissive, genre-blurring landscape offered not only refuge but fertile ground for reinvention. There, in the creative anonymity of Berlin’s basement venues and sound laboratories, NNHMN took form. What began as an experimental collaboration soon evolved into a singular voice in the city’s shadow-streaked electronic underbelly.

A Sound Forged in Melancholy

NNHMN’s musical trajectory, though firmly rooted in Berlin’s subterranean club culture, resists easy categorisation. Their recorded output began in earnest in 2019 with the release of ‘Second Castle,’ a debut EP that introduced their brooding minimalism and penchant for analogue textures. That same year, they unveiled ‘Church of No Religion,’ a full-length release that gestured toward the duo’s broader artistic vision—an immersive, often unsettling meditation on alienation, sensuality, and the spectral. The album garnered attention for its austere production and unflinching emotional tone, positioning NNHMN as a rising force within Europe’s darker electronic vanguard.

This early momentum was swiftly followed by ‘Shadow in the Dark,’ a tightly constructed 2019 release that further distilled their sound into a blend of atmospheric dread and rhythmic propulsion. But it was with the ‘Deception Island’ series in 2020 that NNHMN began to articulate a more expansive sonic mythology. Across these releases, their music embraced a cinematic, sometimes ritualistic quality, weaving together coldwave synths, industrial accents, and narcotic pulses that seemed to blur the lines between desire and detachment.

By the time ‘Tomorrow’s Heroine’ emerged in 2021, the duo had refined their aesthetic into a language of its own—both visceral and ethereal, haunted yet seductive. Their 2022 EP, ‘For The Comfort Of Your Exstazy,’ stood as a culmination of their ongoing experiments, presenting a five-track meditation on intimacy and dystopia with an almost ceremonial restraint. Across each project, NNHMN’s sound draws from the lexicon of darkwave and gothic electronics, but it is their distinct fusion of hypnotic rhythms, spectral melodies, and Margot’s disembodied vocals that renders their music unmistakable. Rather than simply echoing the legacy of 1980s synth minimalism, they reframe it through a contemporary lens—one steeped in personal estrangement and the post-industrial melancholy of modern Europe.

Upcoming Album: ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’

NNHMN’s forthcoming release, ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I,’ is poised to be one of their most ambitious works to date. Slated for release on May 28, 2025, the album promises a deeply immersive experience, one that delves into the liminal space between ecstasy and desolation. Described as a “haunting symphony of desire and despair,” the record builds upon the duo’s established penchant for cinematic atmospherics and spectral storytelling. If their previous works invited listeners into dimly lit corridors of sound, ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’ appears to plunge even further into the shadows, conjuring a sonic landscape that is both intoxicating and unsettling.

At its core, the album channels a sensual melancholy, a beautifully tragic atmosphere where love and loss intertwine with hypnotic precision. The five-track release—featuring ‘Your Demon,’ ‘The Secret,’ ‘Maybe Late,’ ‘Bring it On,’ and ‘Dressing for Pleasure’—unfolds like a nocturnal confession, each song a chapter in a broader narrative of longing and dissolution. The compositions, built upon pulsating synths and ghostly reverberations, retain the band’s signature tension between detachment and seduction, where Margot’s breathy vocal delivery lingers like a whispered incantation over Laudarg’s meticulously crafted soundscapes.

Strategically, NNHMN has opted for a staggered release approach, allowing the album’s mystique to build in anticipation. Pre-orders for the vinyl edition of ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’ commenced on March 7, 2025, catering to their devoted following of collectors and analog purists. The official release, set for May 28, marks not only the arrival of a highly awaited record but also a statement of artistic evolution—one that reaffirms the duo’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of darkwave, while deepening their engagement with the themes of eroticism, loss, and transcendence.

Independence Through K-Dreams Records

While many emerging acts in electronic music rely on third-party labels to shape their trajectory, NNHMN have opted for a different route—one that preserves autonomy over every aspect of their output. Releasing their music through K-Dreams Records, a label they operate independently, the duo have maintained full control over their artistic vision, from sonic production to visual identity. The imprint serves not just as a means of distribution but as an extension of their conceptual universe, where creative direction remains unfiltered by commercial constraint.

This model of self-governance is hardly anomalous within Berlin’s underground, where artists frequently choose to operate outside traditional industry structures. Yet in the case of NNHMN, K-Dreams Records has become more than a vehicle for independence—it is a curated portal into their world of erotic unease and atmospheric austerity. By refusing to compromise on aesthetic or narrative, the duo have cemented a position that is as much curatorial as it is performative. Their forthcoming release arriving May 28 under the K-Dreams banner, reaffirms that position with unflinching clarity.

Integration into Berlin’s Darkwave Scene

Berlin’s reputation as a sanctuary for sonic subcultures has long attracted artists seeking both freedom and reinvention, and NNHMN have become emblematic of how the city continues to nourish the fringes of electronic music. Since relocating from Poland, the duo have absorbed the ethos of Berlin’s darkwave underground, where the boundaries between performance, ritual, and nightlife dissolve. The city’s vast industrial spaces, repurposed clubs, and nocturnal economy have provided a fertile backdrop for the band’s introspective yet physically charged aesthetic—one steeped in the mechanical pulse of techno, the haunting atmospheres of coldwave, and the sensuality of late-night urban decay.

NNHMN’s presence within the Berlin scene is not merely defined by sound but by their deliberate contribution to its ongoing evolution. They have performed in a range of clubs known for curating uncompromising lineups, where their live sets often unfold as intimate séances rather than conventional concerts. Their ability to command such spaces with minimal staging and maximal emotional gravity speaks to the unique alchemy of their craft. Beyond Berlin, their reach has extended across the broader alternative circuit, with appearances at underground festivals in Seoul, New York City, Montreal, and Barcelona. In each setting, their performances serve not only as musical acts but as ambient provocations—immersive experiences where the lines between audience and artist blur under dim strobes and cavernous basslines.

What distinguishes NNHMN is not simply their assimilation into Berlin’s darkwave tradition, but how they refract its elements through their own psychological and aesthetic prism. Their work remains in dialogue with the city’s past—its Cold War hauntings, its hedonistic 1990s rave culture, its ongoing status as Europe’s capital of artistic transience—yet it refuses nostalgia. Instead, their sound emerges as a distilled response to the present: fractured, erotic, and ghostlike, echoing the tension between visibility and erasure that defines Berlin after dark.

Conclusion

As anticipation builds around the release of ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I,’ NNHMN stand at a pivotal moment—not only in their own artistic journey but within the broader contours of dark electronic music. The record arrives at a time when the genre is undergoing a quiet transformation, propelled by a new generation of artists who, like NNHMN, eschew pastiche in favor of something more personal and immersive. With its themes of erotic anguish and spectral desire, the album promises to deepen the duo’s contribution to this shift, offering a sonic experience that is both confrontational and cathartic.

Their role within Berlin’s ever-shifting musical ecosystem has become increasingly significant, not because they dominate the scene, but because they expand its emotional vocabulary. In a city where innovation often collides with nostalgia, NNHMN remains committed to creating work that resists easy categorisation—music that is unafraid of silence, texture, and the spaces between beats. In doing so, they have helped shape a soundscape that reflects Berlin’s darker psyche, one where vulnerability is not masked but amplified, and where intimacy is laced with disquiet. As ‘Opera of Lust & The Art of Sorrow – Part I’ nears its release, it signals more than the arrival of a new record—it suggests the maturing of a band whose influence now resonates far beyond the confines of the city that first gave them shelter.