Band History Jennifer Weist and Johannes “Joe” Walter-Müller are both natives of the German Baltic island Usedom and first met in kindergarten. Walter-Müller started taking music lessons as a five-year-old; he initially began to learn the violin, later he started to play piano. At the age of 13, he met Weist again when she sang at a karaoke show and he invited her to join his school band. They experimented with different genres such as rock, pop, and swing, in the beginning singing in English, later in German and eventually writing their own songs. In 2004, both founded the band Aerials. They met Werner Krumme who would later become their producer during a songwriting workshop in Rostock. After both had finished school having completed the Abitur (German equivalent of A-levels) in summer 2006, they moved to Berlin to pursue a career in music. There they also met their future band members Alex, Christoph, and Baku. The band’s name was based on a misunderstanding at first. Employees at the Planet Roc studios in Berlin repeatedly wrote notes for them addressed to “Jennifer Rostock.” Weist later explained, “Jennifer was directed at me, and Rostock, because they remembered we are from the coast, and Rostock was probably the only town the studio guys knew up there.” This working title was eventually embraced by the band and became their official name. In 2007, the group gave their first concerts as “Jennifer Rostock” and they signed a recording contract with Warner Music. They mainly performed in the Berlin club scene and played as opening acts for the British bands Chikinki and Gallows. In Oktober, Jennifer Rostock released their first EP - “Ich will hier raus” and started to get air time with local radio stations in Berlin. In February 2008, their first single “Kopf oder Zahl” was placed in rotation by MTV Germany. They competed with that song at the Bundesvision Song Contest, a German television show based on the Eurovision Song Contest, and came in at fifth place.Jennifer Rostock’s debut album Ins offene Messer was released the following day and entered the German album charts at number 31. The band’s unorthodox and innovative German lyrics are collectively written by Weist and Walter-Müller, who also compose and arrange the songs. Although the group is difficult to categorise, Jennifer Rostock is often compared to the Neue Deutsche Welle, especially due to their first single, “Kopf oder Zahl,” and its similarities to the German 1980’s band Ideal. The newspaper “Taz” described their music as “somewhere between glam punk, electropop and Berlin-rock”. On June 13th they released the album’s second single “Feuer” (Fire), it was released as a Premium as well as a Basic version. |
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