Pop and Electronic Music 2025
Female Rebels and Babyfaces
DJ Koze | Photo (detail): © Pampa Records
Gender, the Middle East and the club crisis – 2025 was a political year for German pop, with Gen Z artists boldly expressing their aesthetic vision, while still finding time for duets with Ski Aggu.
By Joachim Hentschel
The biggest hit in German pop this year didn’t come from Germany. Yet it was a potential club anthem that thrilled audiences with an appeal few songs achieve. “We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment,” sang Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami to the catchy beat of Golden, the showpiece from the Netflix animated musical KPop Demon Hunters. Golden topped the German charts for nine consecutive weeks and held on to second place until the end of November, ready to leap back up at any moment.
Yet the public spaces that once thrived on this kind of music didn’t really benefit from 2025’s enthusiasm. Broad generalisations about Generation Z, or even younger cultural newcomers, can be annoying, but experience shows that many are happy to queue at concept stores or celebrate new music at home. Clubs, on the other hand, hold less appeal: the thrill of partying with strangers and letting a DJ surprise you all night simply doesn’t draw them in the same way it did for the ’80s and ’90s crowd, who built a nightlife culture that still sets the standard today.
Death of Dance Culture?
The event that became the most tragic symbol of the ongoing decline of club culture in 2025 came right at the very start of the year. Berlin’s iconic techno club Watergate threw its final party on New Year’s Eve, forced to close due to prohibitive rent at its prime city-centre location.A few weeks later, the activist collective Steinzeit.Alter erected a symbolic gravestone in front of the building – a memorial to a piece of the city’s pop culture that has vanished forever – as has happened in many other German cities in recent years and throughout 2025. Just days later, the stone was gone too, removed by the city authorities who deemed it a traffic hazard.
This also feels symbolic – a sign that German institutions struggle to safeguard the few vital free spaces club culture needs to survive in the post-Covid era. Nevertheless, it’s not all doom and gloom. The coalition agreement signed by the new federal government in April 2025 offered a glimmer of hope. Some of the measures suggested (or at least implied) that the CDU/CSU and SPD are keeping the issue on their agenda.
Among other things, plans are in place to revise building use regulations, potentially granting greater flexibility for nighttime events. The long-promised recognition of dance clubs as cultural institutions is also included in the agreement. As always, it’s impossible to say when – or even if – these changes will actually come into force. Still, 2025 showed that while some clubs are quietly dying, promising new venues are springing to life. Wuppertal’s Open Ground, which only launched in 2023, is now hailed by experts as the best club in the world – thanks in part to its friendly, non-competitive atmosphere – a quality that might even entice Gen Z to embrace a more relaxed nightlife.
The World wants Berlin beats
German stars have been fairly accustomed to international acclaim and revenue since the days of Kraftwerk. In 2025, it was success-spoiled Berlin DJ and producer collective Keinemusik that continued to expand their global reputation with gigs in the US, Japan and Abu Dhabi. Ski Aggu, the “Atzen” rapper known for his ski mask, also completed a sold-out club tour across American cities – an unexpected highlight. At the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Germany’s entry, Abor & Tynna, finished 15th, but their song Baller, a magnificently trippy piece of technopop, went on to become the contest’s most commercially successful entry, topping charts in Scandinavia, the UK and even the US.At the opposite end of the 2025 excitement spectrum was a group of young men who also draw on rap, club music and electronic soul. In their case, however, the beat often fades into the background or disappears altogether – such as when Felix Dautzenberg, better known as Berq, sings Blauer Ballon over an echo-laden soundscape: “Du fehlst mir unendlich / Nicht nur dein Lachen, auch der Streit” (I miss you endlessly / not just your laughter, but the fights too). It’s a little cheesy, but it also has that ethereal quality of early cloud rap or the experimental, digitally driven work of James Blake.
“Ich vergess manchmal das Wesentliche: Drogen, Sex und Party machen” (Sometimes I forget what’s most important: doing drugs, having sex and partying), admits Zartmann back in February in his number-one hit Tau Mich auf, seemingly confirming every Gen Z cliché. Zartmann, who reveals neither his first name nor his age, has a typically patchy resumé: he attended regular school, wrote his first songs independently and then built a wider audience online. His rise was partly supported by the aforementioned Ski Aggu, who recorded a duet with him last year – sounding unexpectedly gentle himself.
When boys cry, girls swear
Some speak of the “new German sensitivity”: a fascination with the vulnerable male figure, rarely portrayed with such intensity and embodied by artists like Blumengarten and Smyt. Perhaps it taps into the same emotional needs that once fuelled the success of the smooth, melancholic schlager singers of the 1970s, like Christian Anders and Michael Holm. There’s nothing disreputable about that. What works in their favour is that Berq and his peers deliver performances that are completely contemporary in style. At the Bambi Awards in November, Zartmann even spoke out against right-wing populism – in a manner you wish more celebrities would adopt. Interestingly, the trend – if it can still be called that in such a pluralistic era – has moved in the opposite direction for female artists. Zsá Zsá rapped with full-on aggression: “Drei Bitches auf ‘ner Yacht, und wir sehen gut aus” (Three bitches on a yacht, and we look good), followed by “Dein Boy hat geguckt, tja, das hätte ich auch” (Your boy looked, well, I would have too). Her fluffy urban electropop track Bad Bunnie$, which celebrates the carefree, boundary-pushing fun women can have at night and in the city, became a summer hit in 2025 – just months after Berlin rapper Ikkimel released her debut album Fotze, and Shirin David dropped Schlau aber blond, a follow-up song cycle built around her fitness-themed hit Bauch Beine Po. Their shared audacity sparked debate and even gave rise to a new genre label: Fotzenrap (= cunt rap).Thematically, the music’s roots go back to 1990s US hip-hop culture. Explicit female lyrics have only recently become a hot topic in Germany, largely influenced again by generational factors. Ikkimel, the most prominent representative in 2025, is in her late twenties, studied the humanities and has created a persona that boldly disregards many old taboos. “Ich bin eine geile Fotze und hab mich noch nie geschämt” (I’m a horny cunt and have never been ashamed), she raps, and, amusingly, again in a duet with Ski Aggu: “Aggu hat ‘ne Line auf meinen Arsch gestreut” (Aggu threw a line on my ass). Her motto, in the spirit of Zartmann: drugs, sex and absolutely no compromises.
The lines are rarely clear
The experts – both male and female – are divided. On the one hand, female rappers, with their aggressive style, appropriate words previously considered insults and celebrate a lifestyle still primarily associated with men. On the other, they often end up replicating the same sexist “party slut” clichés their male counterparts have been perpetuating for decades, without adding anything truly new or substantial. The most striking response comes from Ikkimel herself in Jetzt erst recht: “Ist Ikkimel überhaupt noch feministisch? Jetzt tun die kleinen Pisser so, als wär’s ihnen wichtig.” (Is Ikkimel even feminist anymore? Now these little pissers act like they care.)What this debate makes clear is that there is ultimately broad consensus that women, men and non-binary people should enjoy equal rights. However, opinions diverge when it comes to addressing the conflict in the Middle East – a debate that predates 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, killing over 1,200 people, including attendees at the Nova techno festival at Kibbutz Re’im.
Although the two sides in the ensuing war – waged by Israel, in part, in serious violation of international law – signed an initial peace plan in October and released the remaining living hostages, the conflict is unlikely to end any time soon. For years, it has been a topic of ongoing debate, especially within the electronic music scene. The festival summer of 2025 reflected these tensions more than ever. Calls to boycott events that weren’t critical enough of Israel’s policies, and the exclusion of artists who downplayed Hamas or antisemitic terrorism, sparked a fierce public debate. One small consolation: the clashes took place online rather than spilling over into physical violence on dancefloors – a sign, perhaps, that festival-goers are less engaged with world politics than social media outrage and open letters suggest.