Lebanon Hanover: On New Album, a Post-Punk Duo Explores Mental Health and Global Upheaval

The music video for ‘Torture Rack,’ the lead single from Lebanon Hanover’s forthcoming album, opens on a scene of arrested decay. A rusted ferris wheel stands silent against a stark sky, a skeletal monument in a decaying amusement park. This is the visual world of the Swiss-British duo, rendered in striking black-and-white by director Tamas Mesmer, a landscape that serves as a potent metaphor for the emotional turmoil churning within their music. The song itself drifts through a somber, circular haze, a lullaby sung to dull the sting of profound anguish. It is a dissociative fog punctuated by discordant mechanical sounds and hypnotic, slow melodies, a soundscape that captures a state of heartbreaking paralysis.

At the center of this maelstrom is the mournful, restrained voice of Larissa Iceglass. Her delivery is a study in vulnerability, a ghostly tone that floats over the track, narrating a quiet obsession and muted torment. The song’s structure mimics the feeling of being trapped, gently but persistently pulled between the desire for escape and the reality of entrapment, between memory and oblivion.

This haunting track is the first glimpse into ‘Asylum Lullabies,’ the duo’s seventh studio album and their first in five years. The title itself is a paradox, juxtaposing a place of sanctuary with madness, a soothing song with deep disturbance. It is a fitting name for what the band describes as a chronicle of immense personal and global upheaval: an album about “dealing with mental health struggles, a breakup, and ongoing wars,” a work born from a time when “everything falls apart at the same time.” Due for digital release on July 10 via their longtime label Fabrika Records, with a physical release to follow on September 15, the album is poised to be their most intensely personal and culturally resonant statement to date.

For more than a decade, Lebanon Hanover have carved a unique space in the landscape of modern music. They are more than revivalists of a bygone genre; they are essential chroniclers of twentieth-first-century anxieties. They offer no easy solutions or hollow platitudes. Instead, they create a defiant sanctuary for what they have called a form of “rebellious sadness,” transforming the pervasive sense of alienation, despair, and digital detachment into a profound, and strangely hopeful, form of art.

Romantics in a Digital Ruin: An Origin Story

The central irony that underpins the entire artistic project of Lebanon Hanover is that their profound skepticism of the digital world was born from a digital connection. In the late 2000s, Larissa Georgiou, a Swiss art student who would become Iceglass, and William Morris, a British musician who would become Maybelline, did not meet in a smoky Berlin nightclub or a rain-slicked London alley. They met through the algorithms of Last.fm, a music social media website where they bonded by trading recommendations of 1980s post-punk and cold wave music.

Their virtual connection became physical in 2010 when Iceglass traveled to Maybelline’s hometown of Sunderland in the north of England. The environment itself became a crucial third member of the band, a catalyst for their creativity. Iceglass found the post-industrial landscape to be “uncultivated and lifeless,” a “rundown rather primitive northern British lifestyle” that was so “shocking” and “disheartening” that it drove them to self-imposed isolation.

It was in this state of confinement, fueled by what Maybelline called “Sunderland’s grimness,” that their musical partnership exploded. In a single week, they channeled their shared feelings into their first songs—‘Die World,’ ‘Totally Tot’—born from an “instant chemistry” and a desire to create a sound that felt as raw and real as their surroundings were bleak.

Their choice of name, Lebanon Hanover, taken from two neighboring towns in New Hampshire, was a deliberate aesthetic decision. They sought a name that sounded like “no other name,” one that evaded the typical genre signifiers of “The Something” or the German equivalent, “Die Something.” This early choice revealed a sophisticated understanding of branding and world-building, creating a moniker that was evocative and placeless, a fusion of disparate elements much like their own cross-continental, bilingual, and male-female dynamic.

The duo soon relocated to Berlin, a city Iceglass described as a “popular shelter for individualists and rejects from all over,” and played their first official show in October 2010. They caught the attention of Fabrika Records, a Greek label that has remained their home ever since, championing their fiercely independent and uncompromising vision.

This origin story reveals the foundational tension of their work. They are not simply luddites attacking technology from an outside perch; they are artists who have intimately experienced both the connective promise of the internet and its capacity to foster profound loneliness.

Their critiques of digital alienation—heard in songs like ‘Du Scrollst,’ a jab at phone-scrolling club-goers, or ‘Northern Lights,’ a rejection of intimacy through “illusory online personas”—are potent because they come from within. They embody the struggle of the modern romantic: using the tools of a detached world to forge something deeply authentic and emotionally present. This unresolved conflict between their genesis and their message is the central energy source of their art.

The Architecture of a Sound: An ‘Underproduced’ Aesthetic

The musical blueprint for Lebanon Hanover was drawn from the pillars of 1980s post-punk and gothic rock. The band openly cites foundational acts like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus, alongside German trailblazers such as DAF and Xmal Deutschland, as their primary influences. Their work is a direct and reverent dialogue with these forebears, yet it is filtered through a distinctly contemporary sensibility.

Their signature sound is a study in contrasts, a delicate balance between order and chaos. Maybelline provides what the band describes as the “ordered frame,” built upon driving, melodic basslines that often serve as the song’s central hook, and the cold, precise pulse of a drum machine, which they embrace for its stark, “locked machine beat.”

Against this rigid structure, Iceglass layers the “chaotic fragments”: sparse, icy synthesizer melodies and reverb-drenched guitars shimmering with flanger effects. Their vocal interplay further deepens this duality. Iceglass’s “haunting, gloomy” and often deadpan delivery contrasts sharply with Maybelline’s deep, sometimes “blood-curdling” growl. Their voices rarely harmonize in a traditional sense; instead, they exist as two distinct poles of melancholic expression, circling each other in a cold dance.

This philosophy has guided their sonic evolution across a celebrated discography. Their initial trilogy of albums—‘The World Is Getting Colder’ (2012), ‘Why Not Just Be Solo’ (2012), and ‘Tomb for Two’ (2013)—established their core sound, defined by a stark “compositional minimalism and emotional candor.”

These records are beloved by fans for their raw, charmingly “out-of-tune” quality, a testament to their unpretentious origins. A significant turning point came with 2015’s ‘Besides the Abyss,’ their first album recorded in a professional studio. It was a conceptual work born from personal turmoil, as the duo had recently ended their romantic relationship and were living in different countries, making the album a meditation on “parting and new beginning.”

Their sound continued to expand with 2018’s ‘Let Them Be Alien,’ which incorporated elements of shoegaze and neofolk and featured what some fans consider their “best production.” Their most recent full-length, 2020’s ‘Sci-Fi Sky,’ was their most sonically “plentiful” and “indulgent” record to date, pushing into heavier industrial and even metal-adjacent territory, perfectly capturing the dystopian mood of its pandemic-era release.

“Sadness is Rebellion”: Lyrical and Philosophical Ideas

To engage with Lebanon Hanover is to engage with a fully formed worldview, one where melancholy is not a weakness but a form of defiance. The central tenet of their philosophy is articulated in the title of one of their most beloved songs: ‘Sadness is Rebellion.’ In interviews, they frame this concept not as an indulgence in misery, but as a courageous act of emotional honesty in a culture that relentlessly pushes superficial positivity. For them, creating music that acknowledges and explores these difficult feelings has a “healing effect,” both for themselves and for their listeners.

Their lyrics constitute a sustained and incisive critique of the modern world. They are particularly focused on the alienating effects of digital technology. Songs like ‘Autofocus Has Ruined Quality’ and ‘Du Scrollst’ are biting commentaries on the loss of mystery and presence in the age of the smartphone. ‘Northern Lights’ is a damning indictment of a society that seeks connection through “illusory online personas” rather than the vulnerable, messy work of genuine romance. As Iceglass has stated, “Times are hard for romantics in this century… The real passions of life, art, nature, literature and love is just non-existent.”

This deep romanticism is profoundly informed by literature. To understand their mindset is to understand their literary soulmates. Iceglass’s deep admiration for the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard is crucial; she credits his dark, melodic, and bitingly humorous work with having a “healing impact in dark times.” Their shared influences also include the decadent rebellion of Oscar Wilde, the desolate poetry of Herta Müller, and the visionary passion of Arthur Rimbaud, revealing a worldview shaped by writers who stared unflinchingly into the abyss.

This commitment to bleak themes and classic goth tropes has led to a fascinating duality in their reception. Some listeners find their lyrical content—with its frequent mentions of graveyards and over-the-top sorrow—to be “melodramatic” and “bordering on parody.” Yet, a significant portion of their fanbase sees this as a highly self-aware, “tongue in cheek… self deprecating humor,” a form of “meta-goth” that playfully engages with the genre’s conventions.

The truth appears to be that they are doing both at once. They are not simply repeating tropes; they are inhabiting them with absolute sincerity while simultaneously being aware of their history and potential for absurdity. The video for their iconic song ‘Gallowdance,’ in which Iceglass literally dances with a noose around her neck, is a prime example. The image is so on-the-nose that it transcends cliché, becoming a powerful and darkly humorous statement.

This sophisticated strategy of “sincere parody” allows them to be both nostalgic and thoroughly modern, creating a dual-layered appeal for a contemporary audience fluent in the language of post-irony. It allows listeners to connect with the raw, genuine emotion while also appreciating the intellectual, self-referential game being played.

An Asylum for the Alienated: The New Album

‘Asylum Lullabies’ arrives at a moment of profound global and personal fracture, and it is explicitly positioned as the band’s response. The album tackles themes of “dissociation, the romanticization of interior confinement, mental health, heartbreak, and the terrible situations currently happening in the world,” making it a direct reflection of a period of intense crisis.

The lead single, ‘Torture Rack,’ serves as a potent microcosm of the album’s concerns. Sonically, it builds on their signature palette of “sharp basslines” and “ethereal synthesizers” but introduces “discordant mechanical sounds” that create a uniquely “unsettling atmosphere”. Lyrically, Iceglass’s “restrained, ghostly tone” conveys a sense of “quiet obsession and muted torment,” capturing a state of psychological paralysis that is reinforced by the video’s imagery of a “decaying amusement park”. The song and its visual counterpart work in tandem to translate the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of emotional decay.

The new album also promises to continue the band’s recent sonic evolution. While their core sound remains intact, their 2023 single ‘Better Than Going Under’ introduced a surprising element of “folk-driven acoustic dream pop,” drawing comparisons to the more pop-inflected work of The Cure. This willingness to incorporate acoustic textures suggests a broadening of their sonic palette that may well feature on ‘Asylum Lullabies.’

Simultaneously, the album is described as “very heavy,” a direction that points to the growing influence of Maybelline’s solo project, Qual. Under this moniker, Maybelline explores a harsher, more aggressive industrial sound, with the project’s name itself meaning “torment”—a theme that now appears central to Lebanon Hanover’s work. This influence was already audible on the ‘Sci-Fi Sky’ track ‘Digital Ocean,’ which reviewers noted for its resemblance to Qual’s sound.

This creative feedback loop, where Maybelline’s solo explorations serve as a sonic laboratory for the duo, allows the band to push their sound into darker, heavier territory without abandoning their core aesthetic. Qual functions as a kind of shadow self for Lebanon Hanover, and its forays into torment and industrial noise are now being fully integrated, promising what may be their most intense and cathartic album yet.

A Visual Memento Mori: The World in Black and White

The world of Lebanon Hanover is not just auditory; it is a meticulously constructed visual universe. Their music videos, album art, and personal style are guided by the same raw, intuitive, and staunchly do-it-yourself principles as their music. Iceglass has stated that for her, “feelings are more important than production,” and that she intentionally avoids “too many effects or fast cuts” in an effort to create something “tangible and raw.” This philosophy is evident in their self-directed videos, which function as cinematic extensions of their musical themes.

Their most iconic video, for the song ‘Gallowdance,’ established their visual identity and even provided the artwork that has become their de facto logo. The stark image of Iceglass performing a sorrowful, mechanical jig with a noose around her neck is a powerful, literal memento mori—a dance with death itself. Fan interpretations view the video’s narrative, which intercuts scenes of a man running in desperation with the haunting figure of Iceglass, as a metaphor for fleeing one’s own suicidal thoughts.

The video for ‘Hard Drug,’ scripted by Iceglass, is a poignant reflection on pandemic-era isolation. It depicts a separated couple living parallel lives, their only connection coming through shared memories and cracked screens, perfectly capturing the song’s theme of love as both an addiction and a painful withdrawal. In contrast, the video for ‘Better Than Going Under’ masterfully balances the band’s inherent dualities. It follows Maybelline as he finds simple, almost childlike joy in a day out, a narrative of cautious optimism that literally collides with the signature gloom of Iceglass, whom he meets among the gravestones of a cemetery. The video suggests that hope and melancholy are not mutually exclusive but can, and often do, coexist.

Across their visual work, a cohesive language emerges. There is the consistent use of black-and-white cinematography, a fascination with desolate and romantic landscapes—British seashores, misty forests, industrial ruins—and a carefully cultivated “well-mannered androgynous look” inspired by Art Nouveau and the fashion of the 1920s and 1980s. This visual identity is not an afterthought; it is a crucial element that reinforces the timeless, melancholic, and rebellious world of their music.

Lebanon Hanover in the Post-Punk Continuum

In the landscape of contemporary music, Lebanon Hanover stands as pillars of the modern darkwave and post-punk revival. They have, as Iceglass herself noted, successfully built a “bridge between 80s and today’s music,” introducing the sounds and sensibilities of a formative underground movement to a new and fervent younger generation.

Their sound is rooted in the original post-punk ethos, which fused the raw energy of punk with a more experimental, art-focused approach, characterized by angular guitars, prominent basslines, and intellectual themes. They are direct descendants of darkwave, the genre’s “gloomy and melancholy variant,” which embraced minor keys and introspective lyrics to explore the bleaker corners of the human condition.

Part of their compelling narrative, especially in North America, has been shaped by forces beyond their control. For nearly a decade, the band was largely absent from the American stage due to repeated visa denials that forced the cancellation of multiple tours. This long-term scarcity, however, did not diminish their following; it amplified it.

The real-world, geopolitical barrier of a denied visa became a perfect, tangible metaphor for the emotional barriers and themes of distance and longing that permeate their music, most explicitly in songs like ‘Invite Me To Your Country.’ The inability of their North American fans to see them was a literal enactment of the yearning expressed in their songs. This dynamic transformed them from a touring act into a near-mythical entity, a cult phenomenon fueled by absence and desire.

When they finally returned for a triumphant, sold-out United States of America tour in 2023, the concerts were more than just performances; they were cathartic communions. Live reports describe their shows as “mesmerizing,” “hypnotic,” and “insane” experiences, defined by the stark visual contrast between Iceglass’s “ice-cold,” static presence and Maybelline’s frenetic, energetic dancing—a physical manifestation of the band’s core tensions. For the devoted fans who had waited ten years, it was the culmination of a long and deeply felt narrative.

The Long-Awaited Communion

As the world awaits the full unveiling of ‘Asylum Lullabies,’ Lebanon Hanover are preparing for their most extensive North American tour to date. Curated by Persona Grata, the tour is scheduled to sweep through the East Coast and Midwest in the autumn of 2025 before heading to the West and Southwest in the spring of 2026, including highly anticipated dates in Canada.

This tour represents the ultimate fulfillment of the long-standing desire for connection between the band and their dedicated North American audience. It is the physical manifestation of the “longing for bonds and true friendships” that Iceglass has spoken of since the band’s inception, a communion with the “peculiar emotional crowd” of “individualists and rejects” who have found a sanctuary in their music.

Conclusion

Lebanon Hanover’s enduring importance lies in their unique ability to provide a soundtrack for navigating a deeply troubled world. For over a decade, they have operated as cultural cartographers, mapping the anxieties of an age defined by digital detachment and a yearning for authentic connection. Their journey, from the self-imposed isolation of a grim English town to their status as reluctant icons of a global subculture, is a testament to a singular, unwavering vision. They do not offer false hope or easy answers. Instead, they validate the darkness, finding beauty in melancholy, strength in vulnerability, and a strange, defiant optimism even while feeling stretched on a metaphorical ‘Torture Rack.’

With ‘Asylum Lullabies,’ the duo is not changing course but deepening their inquiry. The album appears to be the most direct confrontation with the themes that have always lingered beneath the surface of their work: mental fragility, the pain of separation, and the struggle to find sanctuary in a world that feels increasingly hostile. It is the sound of two artists processing personal and collective trauma in real time, using the familiar language of cold wave and post-punk to articulate something profoundly contemporary.

In the end, their message is one of profound and hard-won endurance. By transforming sadness into a form of rebellion, they have created more than just a catalog of songs; they have built a space for a community of outsiders. It is a philosophy best articulated in the chorus of a recent song, a line that serves as both a mission statement and a quiet prayer: “Life is full of wonder, it is better than going under.”