Electric Callboy are always charged up and ready for action.
Crowds at Good Things Festival saw that first-hand when the German electronicore group performed there this year.
The first time Australian audiences met Electric Callboy was at the 2022 edition of Good Things. As first recalled in a 2023 profile of the band, that first visit to Australia was an emotional one for the six-piece from Castrop-Rauxel, capping off a momentous year of international touring off the back of viral singles including “Hypa Hypa”, “Pump It”, and “We Got the Moves”.
Their brand of metalcore, EDM and expanded melodic sounds brought the band success through Europe in the early stages of their career, though the introduction of vocalist Nico Sallach and the beginning of Electric Callboy’s 2022 TEKKNO era is what has truly given them legacy impact within their scene.
Performing on one of the smaller festival stages in 2022, it became quickly evident that a band such as Electric Callboy were always on track to level up.
Announcing their debut headline tour mere months later was a great way to gauge how successful that first Good Things run was for the band; all shows selling out in rapid succession, leading to multiple upgrades, the messaging was clear.
Australian audiences had developed a taste for TEKKNO, and they wanted more.
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Fast forward to 2024, the band has been riding the final waves of the TEKKNO album cycle through another successful North American and European tour; as well as achieving new levels of notoriety thanks to their collaboration with BABYMETAL, on the track “RATATATA”.
With over 55 million streams and 30 million views of the music video to date, “RATATATA” has been an inspired addition to both bands’ catalogues but for Electric Callboy fans, an intriguing step forward into a new creative arc.
The band’s return to Australia for Good Things 2024 feels like somewhat of a homecoming, and one that came packed with a few major curveballs.
Originally set to perform a late afternoon set on one of the festival’s main stages, Electric Callboy found themselves bumped to festival co-headliner status, following the withdrawal of Sum41 due to Deryck Whibley’s hospitalisation with pneumonia.
With these Australian appearances being festival exclusives, the Electric Callboy team found themselves rejigging an already dynamic live show to be nighttime and headliner-friendly (read: pyro, and lots of it).
Then, the second curveball hits. The morning of the Melbourne leg of the festival, the band receive word that drummer David Friedrich has fallen ill and needs to return to Germany. Within the span of a day, Electric Callboy had a fill in, fittingly, Sum 41’s Frank Zummo, a beast of a session drummer who, by the end of the band’s final show in Brisbane, had the set down.
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Before the band’s Melbourne show, the energy emanating from vocalists Sallach and Kevin Ratajczak is an understandable blend of stress, excitement and expectation.
Even being back in Australia for their third year in a row, playing even larger crowds, is something they still find tricky to wrap their heads around.
“Whenever we talk to people from Australia they’re always like, ‘You guys are always so very anticipated and we can’t wait to have you back,’” Sallach says. “This is one of the greatest appreciations that you can get as a musician, it feels unreal.”
“Totally unreal,” Ratajczak agrees. “Whatever field you work in, you expect feedback for your work, you know? It has always kept us balanced, the feedback from the people; it’s always fitting. But now, it feels there is much more coming back to us than we have put in.”
“We’re still those same musicians from Castrop-Rauxel! When we meet people, when we see what’s going on here at the Good Things Festival… it’s so much more than we would expect.”
Arriving in Australia fresh off the back of a sold out headline show in Tokyo, an experience Ratajczak describes as a “a dream, three-day rush through Japan”, the band’s Good Things shows, in a way, marks the end of the TEKKNO cycle.
Work on their seventh studio album is well underway – two of nine songs are basically ready – in the band’s studio in Castrop-Rauxel, Germany.
Though according to Ratajczak and Sallach, finding the time and the right circumstances to get new album chemistry going has been more complicated this time around, given the growth of Electric Callboy’s profile and tour schedule.
“We always had enough time to be at home between the tours and we could completely calm down and just focus on writing new songs,” Ratajczak explains.
“Since it’s gotten a little bit bigger, we’re forced to write on tour; decide things on tour. We only have limited time at home that we have to use very efficiently, you know? This has always been something that collides: creativity on the one hand, short [amounts of] time on the other.”
Sallach agrees. “It took some time for us to find the right vibe and the right dynamic to completely focus on writing new songs. The problem is that you can’t force yourself to be creative in the studio, to have a free mind.”
“Right now, we are at the perfect point. The two songs that we have written right now, they happened pretty fast. That makes me pretty positive and confident.”
Taking this positivity into 2025, Electric Callboy will not be taking much time off. New music videos and bespoke content in the pipeline along with new music and a brand new world tour set to kick off in the second half of the year will keep the band plenty busy as their new album comes together.
This year’s Good Things may be the final time Australian fans see the German favourites out this way for a little while but given the hints we receive from Ratajczak and Sallach drop about what is to come, their eventual return with a brand new show will be more than worth the wait.
“Our state of mind with everything right now is that… the bigger it all gets, the more humble I get,” Sallach says.
“This is the same for everybody in the band. We’re super thankful for everything, for being able to do this. It’s crazy. A helluva ride, that’s for sure.”
See Tone Deaf’s exclusive photos from the Sydney leg of Good Things 2024.
