Since 2023, Munich, Germany’s Schrotthagen, the dynamic techno duo consisting of Giovanni Berg and Dieter Schleip, has been transforming the electronic music landscape with a sound that merges cinematic storytelling, hard techno, and trance. Drawing from their roots in classical music, jazz, punk, and film scoring, the pair combines decades of experience across two generations to create something distinctly their own. On November 27, 2026, Schrotthagen will release its third studio album, Neue Welt, continuing an ambitious conceptual journey through artistic freedom, memory, technology, and the future of creativity.
The album’s pre-order and save campaign is already live, with Neue Welt serving as the latest chapter in a broader progression that began with Schrotthagen’s 2024 debut, Sturm und Drang. Inspired by the historical literary and artistic movement of the same name, the album explored artistic freedom and established the foundation for the duo’s cinematic approach to electronic music.
That story continued with 2025’s Nostalgie and Traurigkeit, an album influenced by romanticism and centered around themes of aging, memory, letting go, acceptance, and the relationship between the past and present. With Neue Welt, Schrotthagen shifts its focus toward the future, examining dreams, artificial intelligence, social media, technology, and the changing nature of creativity through its Dream Machine concept.
At the heart of the new album is a question that becomes increasingly relevant as technology becomes more deeply integrated into everyday life: Are our dreams still truly our own?
That concept takes shape sonically through Schrotthagen’s exploration of the relationship between organic and synthetic sound. The album’s already released singles — “Back To Life” featuring rising German songstress bonniemxsy, “Rain Tonight,” “Million Empty Faces,” and “I Wanna Feel Alive” — offer early glimpses into that contrast.
Real-world elements including vocalists, a mellotron, and even yodeling are placed alongside synthetic instrumentation, directly reflecting the album’s central tension between the organic and the artificial. Musically, Neue Welt also finds the duo pushing further outside the boundaries established by their previous releases. Some tracks lean toward a more pop-oriented sound, while others become darker and significantly harder.
Despite those shifts, the recognizable Schrotthagen identity remains intact. The album instead expands the project’s sonic vocabulary while exploring new territory, with another new track expected to arrive in October ahead of the full album release.
The album’s themes will also extend into Schrotthagen’s live performances as the duo embarks on a North American tour leading into the release of Neue Welt. The run will bring the project to venues in Philadelphia, Montreal, Seattle, Toronto, New York, and Portland, along with a festival appearance at Dreamstate in Southern California.
For its headline performances, Schrotthagen is developing an expansive stage design inspired by the Dream Machine concept. Reactive stage elements and unique lighting effects will become part of a production that combines electronic music with elements of film, theater, opera, dance, and performance.
The goal is to create an experience that feels less like watching a traditional concert and more like stepping inside a film. Rather than simply observing the story of Neue Welt from the outside, the audience becomes part of it.
That immersive approach reflects what makes Schrotthagen difficult to define as simply an electronic or techno act. At its core, the project is built around the combination of two very different people and two generations, bringing together film composition, electronic music, cinematic storytelling, humor, and technology while continually questioning what it means to remain human and creative in an increasingly digital world.
That tension — between analog and digital, old and new, human and artificial, reality and dreams — provides the clearest foundation for Schrotthagen’s work. With Neue Welt, the duo turns that tension toward the future, using its evolving sound and immersive live concept to explore where creativity might go next.
Schrotthagen’s third studio album Neue Welt arrives November 27, 2026.