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Brutalismus 3000, the duo of producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, appear framed inside a Zoom window from their Berlin apartment, set against an art piece of Blade, half-human, half-vampire, posed in front of an American flag. The image is a fitting background for artists whose work thrives on tension, distortion, and cultural collision. It's bold, colorful, and fucking fun.
Their sophomore album Harmony, out today, is a collection of unrelenting, constantly mutating bangers pushed to the point of collapse. Produced by Zeitner with co-production from Boys Noize and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, and featuring contributions from British-Argentine actress Anya Taylor-Joy and ‘80s electronic legends Underworld, it’s a brilliantly balanced collaborative record — more of an “album” album in scope and construction compared to their 2023 debut Ultrakunst. Across its 13 tracks, Brutalismus 3000 build a world of hardcore, gabber, and industrial pressure that dissolves into something stranger and more cinematic. It’s music that triggers a full-body reaction, an almost unbearable stimulation that makes the mind and body want to run.
“I think we need to be in a good place, in a good moment. We need to be balanced,” Vassiliki Daldas explains, grounding the record’s chaos in an unexpected philosophy of emotional control, and also a tequila shot. That sense of balance becomes the hidden architecture beneath all the noise: a thrilling tension between violence and clarity, between music that feels possessed and music that suddenly opens into pop light. Even at its most structured, Harmony refuses stability, instead leaning into volatility as a creative force.
At its extremes, the album transforms into something hallucinatory. Beats hit like demonic bouncing balls, while layers of fuzz and industrial static swell into mushroom clouds of distortion and poetic abstraction. There's a menacing cab man, teeth with no face, and lots of guns. Screams are cut off mid-breath and reappear later like ghosts in the mix. Within that haze, details fracture and reassemble: children’s voices echo like playground static, screams are swallowed and then return, and entire tracks feel like they’re mutating from techno eruption into doom-laden collapse mid-motion.
Beneath the abrasion, there’s a strange emotional pull. There are moments of softness, memory, and return. “You Were Never Really Here But I Miss Ya" is a cute hauntological pop track, which is then followed by the transcendent Underworld collab "Friends At The Pigshed." Zeitner explains that the initial intention for Harmony was "good music but really bad vibes." But light and, well, harmony began to seep into the process towards the end of its creation. After over a year of a globe-trotting process spanning LA, New York, Portugal, and beyond, they brought Harmony home in its final four months, finishing it in their style. "That was the most important part of the process," he smiles.
That return home becomes Harmony’s grounding point: a record built from sensory overload and chaos, but ultimately stitched together in intimacy. In our interview, Zeitner and Vassiliki Daldas told me about core influences on the album. Read parts of our conversation below.
Poetry As Gateway To Songwriting
THEO ZEITNER: The influences are so different from what we do, but somehow those are still the main influences. Like Leonard Cohen or something couldn't be further from the music, but we feel really inspired by, especially his lyrics.
VICTORIA VASSILIKI DALDAS: We have a lot of poem books of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave.
Did you come to these collaborations with guidelines on how you wanted things to be executed, or were things a little bit more fluid in terms of people coming together in a room and just seeing what happens?
ZEITNER: With Underworld, it's the only thing where someone else wrote, so Karl [Hyde] writes very different than us. He just has so much material, because he writes every day for like, I don't know how many years. We didn't have any idea of what the track is going to be, and we just went through, he has a million scrapbooks that are just full of lyrics. "Oh, I wrote this in Berlin. Let's do this. You guys are from Berlin. Let's do this track." And then kind of went in there a little bit, and then Vicky wrote from there, and like we wrote together in the studio. And yeah, with the other ones, they weren't really like the other ones. It was just completely our lyrics.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: We just started from poetry that we both collected, and then we just throw it together. We took the best sentences out, and that's maybe how the lyrical process went. We don't write a song kind of ready, or we do it sometimes, but not really, not in a song structure. It’s more like poetry, and then we just drag out the best things, and then maybe we'll make it work that it fits to the song.
So poetry and songwriting blur together for you?
VASSILIKI DALDAS: Yeah.
ZEITNER: Other parts are way easier to think in terms of poems or something, and write everything down and make a really messy piece that can be really pretty as well, and then strip it down to song structure. Writing in song structures, I don’t know you got to be a songwriter for that. It's not boring, but it's like it's a very different talk. It's like writing a script, a screenplay, or writing a book, kind of is the difference. And I think it's more fun to just write a book.
So, you don't consider yourself songwriters?
ZEITNER: I mean, in a way, I just mean like more classically, we’re not classically songwriters.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: To think about a story and put it on paper, for me it doesn't really work. For me it's always very abstract of how I think or how I want to put my emotions or experiences. It's always more abstract, and that's why maybe I'm also saying it's more poetic in the way of writing, than being more very specific with topics.
Death Grips & D.A.F.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: We’re big fans of Death Grips, and I also was very inspired of how the lyrics are written. A little bit stream of consciousness, but also in a very aggressive and violent way, and also very abstract. That was a big inspiration for me, but also all the German punk bands like D.A.F., how with simplicity, you can also say a lot.
Good Music With Really Bad Vibes
ZEITNER: Not completely leaving in the sound because there’s still gabber and hardcore, but more like no restriction. When we did tracks before, we really thought about where are they gonna be in the set, how's it gonna feel in a club. Now it was really the first time doing the album just for the album's sake, and really not thinking about how this is gonna feel at 4am in a club. But I hope it feels great if it comes there.
What was your mindset going into the album? How did it begin to take shape?
ZEITNER: We just had the title Harmony, and we had this little plan to make a really aggressive and really toxic record that we just put up and make the world a little bit worse. You know, like make something that is just really bad on all fronts. It's good music but really bad vibes. We're really against this toxic positivity vibe and, you know, "I'm in my own lane, I'm doing my thing, I'm thriving." We wanted to do something that's the opposite. And then that was the beginning. And then all the tracks were super aggressive in the beginning, and somewhere in the process it changed. The creative process became so much lighter and happier than we planned it to be. It became a really different process. The second year of working on the record, in comparison to the first year was very different.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: We tried to put first all the ideas out that we have, and it was super chaotic. Like you said after one year, more of a red line —
ZEITNER: The harmony.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: The harmony [laughs] exactly, shaping it then to something that you can see as a whole. I think the process of recording was very harmonic in general. Also, when it's maybe some darker themes, and you know, some politic topics we always created in a good moment, in a harmonic moment, and also with people that we wanted to work with.
Horror Films Audition (1999) & Kairo (2001) & Safe (1995)
ZEITNER: I mean, in general, what I really love about horror — and I also hear a lot of people who have ADHD, which is what I have, love horror a lot. It's a classic thing that they're really drawn to that, and over stimulation feels really good to the brain sometimes. The intensity of the emotions, the intensity of whatever is happening on screen can be really calming to me. If it's really pressing and if it's really serious, it just gives me a good feeling. And it's also what we do in our music. The really intense aggressiveness of it is just something that we...
VASSILIKI DALDAS: ...find calming. Yeah. Als,o growing up with punk music and mosh pits and everything — I think for us it's more the calming part of that. And that, I think, makes sense in a lot of people's brains.
That's so true, and very relatable. I come from a family that don't really like horror movies, but I love them so much. I'm a very anxious person, but there's something about it that feels like wading into that uncomfortable feeling, and exploring it in a way, it feels less intimidating than just sort of avoiding it.
ZEITNER: Exactly. You’re actually feeling something, it’s actually provoking. Horror and comedy are kind of the same. A good comedy is so fucking rare, but if a movie makes you afraid, and if a movie actually makes you laugh, it's like that's insane. If they really, that's like the one fucking goal they have.
Maybe I was reading too much into this, but with Japanese horror films that you listed as influences, such as Audition and Pulse, there's so much fucked up shit that's going on, and it's all very unsettling, but at the same time, sometimes the soundtrack can be like so delicate and very piano-driven or eerie.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: Also, I think not any European movie could portray this feeling of deep dread and loneliness and isolation better. I think they have a really different concept of showing you know how the world it feels less populated and less human.
ZEITNER: This is a something that kind of fits to sometimes our music, as well, this kind of very something that seems very easy, or seems very, very happy in the foreground, has a really dark undertone. With the video for “I Bring My Gun To The Function,” this really cuteness of the video, but also has that underlying war agenda behind it. It’s something that we play with. On the record before we had a track called “Gevalt Gevalt,” which means “violence, violence,” and it was like for people they saw it as like having anxiety in the club, but for us it was really just like the feeling of the war next door in the club, like you're dancing, but there's actually like an army waiting to invade your space, that was kind of the feeling we're portraying. That's something we often work with, a soft feeling and a sense of dread underneath.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: I think in general biggest inspiration is movies, and then we just try to feel the vibe of, and then a song comes out of it maybe, using cinema to feel. We rewatched all the Lynch movies, we had a lot of ideas from there, and also like for some aesthetical stuff. Safe the movie for us was a big inspiration, obviously, Kairo, or what it said before, with how there's especially in Japan this approach of how they portray loneliness. I think it's very different. He saw it first, and then showed it to me, and it's still struck in my head. It’s this very unsettling feeling of humans disappearing, and humanity and...
ZEITNER: ...apocalypse of sadness, kind of.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: Also, some fun movies. I don't know, John Waters was the biggest break for me. This chaotic way of making a movie, and okay, let's, how can you do that as a song?
Nostalgia
ZEITNER: I'm super drawn to nostalgia, I don't know why. I like old video cassettes, old horror movies. I don't know.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: We played PlayStation 2 yesterday. We bought an old Jackass game [laughs]. If you see our flat, I think it mirrors our love for common love for nostalgia.
ZEITNER: It’s also such a sad feeling sometimes, but it's very beautiful. But in the music, I guess only the Underworld track is nostalgic. It actually makes me kind of nostalgic because Karl’s vocals are — the experience I always imagine the downer, the comfort, the light and everything. But it feels sad how he says it, a little bit. I know it feels nostalgic to me for the very early 20s when we moved here, and partying was our only job, which is very different now [laughs].
It waffles between a sort of negative and positive space, which I think is really interesting, and also sort of realistic in a sense, like as an escapist thing — or is it sort of like a trap.
VASSILIKI DALDAS: Like a fake feeling of nostalgia sometimes. Sometimes when you remember things and then in the end it wasn't like that.
Harmony is out now on Live From Earth/Columbia.
English (US) · 