| ABOUT International Music
The band was founded in 2015 in Essen by Peter Rubel (guitar, keyboard and vocals), Pedro Goncalves Crescenti (bass and vocals) and Joel Roters (drums). Rubel studied composition at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Crescenti German and English at the Ruhr University Bochum. Roters is a visual artist and only started playing drums when the band was founded. International Music has been performing publicly since 2016 and released the EP Mein Schweiss on SoundCloud in the same year and on compact cassette in March 2017. On April 27, 2018, the debut album The Best Years was released on the Berlin indie label Staatsakt. The eighty-minute double album received unanimous praise from the music press. The Musikexpress described the style, which combines different genres and influences, of International Music as follows: "It meets ... The Jesus And Mary Chain on Can on F.S.K., over all of which hovers in some songs a very elusive, almost shanty-like melancholy." The radio station ByteFM describes the album as "a dense network of lacony, melancholy, psychedelia and post-punk, in which the listener is only too happy to get caught." Zündfunk summarized the band's qualities as follows: “The lyrics can best be compared with those of Andreas Spechtl from Ja, Panik - also because of the German-English mixture. This has nothing to do with Tocotronic, Blumfeld or Olli Schulz. We don't find any catchy slogans, nothing hyper-intellectual and no straightforward storytelling. But it never gets boring musically: You think of FSK, La Düsseldorf, Krautrock, Velvet Underground, John Cale - and Freddy Quinn. " Laut.de gave the debut album the highest rating and described the effect of the music: “Genius and madness are often close together, like with a Helge Schneider. You almost have to cry with emotion and at the same time hold your stomach in excitement. The famous Ruhrpott drama also floats with International Music: melancholy in the intoxication of the guitar. " The band itself names The Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, Trio and The Beatles as inspiration. The best years reached first place in the annual charts of the best albums 2018 of the Musikexpress. The magazine also selected the debut in 2019 at number 36 of the 100 best German albums of all time. In 2018, the band was awarded the popNRW Prize of the NRW KULTURsekretariat and Landesmusikrat Nordrhein-Westfalen as the best newcomer. ByteFM named The Best Years as the best album of the year according to a listener survey detektor.fm, the album was voted in first place. In 2020 International Music won the young talent award at the German Music Author Award. On April 23, 2021, the second studio album, Ententraum, was released, which, like the debut album by Staatsakt, was released as a double album. The album received very positive reviews; The band's idiosyncratic song lyrics and creative energy were praised, as they expanded their repertoire to include elements from progressive rock and new wave. Ententraum entered the German album charts at number 13. School friends Peter Rubel and Pedro Goncalves Crescenti have been making music together since 2006 and with The Düsseldorf Düsterboys they have another band that is closer to psychedelic folk and lo-fi. [Their debut album Nenn mich Musik was released in October 2019 | | |
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