New German Cinema

About

“Stormy and cathartic dark-pop gems.” The voice and songwriter of Fear of Men, Jess Weiss, carries that same lyrical precision and emotional intensity into her solo project New German Cinema. It’s been five years in the making, stretched between London and LA, built from late-night files, long silences and the quiet persistence of trying to finish something beautiful. Produced with Alex DeGroot (Zola Jesus, Cate Le Bon), it feels both forensic and devotional, the product of someone who doesn’t rush catharsis. Pain Will Polish Me presents both solitary and connective, as if built from long-distance transmissions between two dream states.

Weiss calls it a meditation on pop and European art-house auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It tracks the ways intimacy and control fold into one another until it’s impossible to tell where one ends. The songs are about the parts of yourself that dissolve in love, and the small acts of violence that come with being known. They move through claustrophobic relationships, obsession, surrender, cycles of suffering that start to feel like devotion. The language is pop but the feeling is something stranger, colder, more interior. The songs move in shadow. Layers of synth, vocal and guitar fold over one another, drawing from the cinematic tension of Fassbinder’s New German Cinema and the quiet dissonance of modern Berlin, where Weiss recorded fragments of the record, drifting between places that carry uneasy ghosts. Between dinner conversations about the city’s buried history and the surreal comfort of its present, she found herself tracing the outlines of love and loss, identity and dissolution.

The album’s lead track is My Mistake - a collaboration with Carson Cox of Merchandise. What began as an Italo disco experiment evolved into a goth club anthem, charged and restless. It captures the push and pull of Weiss’s themes - devotion as both destruction and release. Weiss has a knack for making pain feel both exquisite and familiar. The album artwork picks up these themes, hovering between the everyday mundanity of a Fassbinder domestic scene, and something less recognisable, punctuated by surreal elements that move us into dreamscape, both familiar and disquieting. The shell and sea reference Botticelli's Venus: a figure born from sea foam created when Uranus’s severed genitals fell into the ocean - an image of creation through destruction. The shell becomes her vessel of birth, representing transformation, protection and fertility - the bridge between divine creation and human life. Weiss extends this theme of renewal to the personal; her baby daughter's babbles feature on the record.

Presented by Love Thy Neighbour.

This is an 18+ event