“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement,” we wrote of the Berlin-based artist previous album back in 2024. “A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience.” Ocher combined a wide range of styles and influences to bring this concept to life, and the result was varied and fluid enough to be at once pressingly timely and conscious of the long history of subversive art.
Fast forward a couple of years and Mary Ocher is set to return with Weimar, a brand new full-length that promises to be every bit as ambitious and politically resonant as its predecessor. As the title suggests, the album has roots in the early twentieth century, both in terms of the minimalist sensibilities and the overarching themes, but it is impossible to think of the intra-war period of the 1900s without hearing ominous echoes of the present day. Opener and lead single ‘The Dance’ introduces the spare, poignant chamber pop aesthetic which marks the record, as well as the combination of melancholy and anxiety which emerges as a result. The sense of things teetering on the edge of darkness, where encroaching violence carries with it not only fear and dread but a kind of anticipatory loss. A mournful dirge for that which is slipping through our fingers.
Watch the video below, filmed by Tanno Pippi and Francisco Quezada at Medienwerkstatt Kulturwerk Bethanien, Berlin, edited by Francisco Quezada and directed by Mary Ocher herself:
Weimar will be released on the 13th March via Underground Institute and you can pre-order it from the Mary Ocher Bandcamp page.