Album by Endless Wellness from Vienna: Maybe the internet is to blame?

If you don't understand the world, you can at least make music about it. Just like the Viennese band Endless Wellness does. In the songs on their new second album "Domino Days" they don't explain the present, but they live through it intensively: with defiant singing, guitar hooklines between indie pop, punk and lyrics that deal with failures, stains of testimony and a world made of plastic.

The sound of “Domino Days” takes a listener a moment to sort out, but then you are convinced. There are two years and a lot of development between the debut “What a luck” and its successor.

Endless Wellness now sound more confident. Two of the four band members sing. Philipp Auer's sometimes declamatory singing seems to take some getting used to at first, but in the opening song "Züge" his pointed powers of observation stand out.

Endless Wellness: “Domino Days” (Buback/Indigo). Live: November 25th, 2026 “Technikum” Munich, November 26th, 2026 “Dieselstrasse” Esslingen, November 27th, 2026 “Building 9” Cologne; will continue

As with many German-speaking indie bands, associations with the early Tocotronic sometimes arise. With “Nobody is allowed to tell us what we should do,” Endless Wellness is reminiscent of the gesture of the Hamburg School, where, as is well known, the symbiosis of defiance and poetry became popular in the 1990s.

“Tongs, rod, grab, leave, nights and days”, after a few songs the band leaves couplets and cross rhymes behind and also gains linguistic independence. In “Trains,” Adele Ischia’s guitar shreds snotty. A nice contrast to the more balanced sound of “Platanen”, where bassist Milena Klien takes over the vocals for the first time. Violin and vibraphone underline her balanced voice.

Despite all the sonic sugar, the lyrics are critical when Klien sings that “the internet has no arm that can hold me in my fortress of plastic and paper”. The melancholy violin melody underlines the tiring feeling of a generation that has difficulty letting go emotionally. Maybe the internet is to blame. Maybe the boomers.

Melodically complex, Endless Wellness offers a kaleidoscope of contemporary pop styles. When Auer recites lines like “In moist hands I held my testimony/The protocol of failure” with a touch too much theatricality, he is audibly playing with his voice. His biting humor also drives the songs.

In the title song “Domino Days” singer Philipp Auer finally breathes deeply. Instead of his usual defiant voice, he just mumbles into the microphone and loses his operetta-like attitude. A minimalist drum set plays, simple but effective. “Never Safer” is particularly rousing, rhythmically mixing social and everyday criticism with esprit.

It continues rich in contrast and punk. When Klien sings, Ischia's guitar creates space, sawing loudly in four-four time. “Tolerance of ambiguity” screams the bassist – ironically, the term refers to the ability to endure uncertainty without becoming upset or overwhelmed by worries. “Domino Days” by Endless Wellness is an album against collective insecurity and overload, which makes opposites, contradictions and social centrifugal forces into core themes and at the same time offers a hand to escape from modern dreariness.

This is due to the range of content, the humor, the defiance, which transforms sadness and anger about a world on the edge into amusing song lyrics. And there are quite unexpected breaks, for example when in “The Cat” a repetitive guitar abruptly falls silent and instead a piano played by Adele Ischia intervenes, as if you were sitting in a saloon.

The intro of “Happy and you know it” sounds like it’s leading into a film. Lyrically, egocentricity is dealt with, while Ischia's piano invites melancholy to take a stroll and the drums use jazzy rhythms. Even the outro surprises as the song veers into Pixies territory.

Slightly depressed, cool and opposite, so you don't see it coming. The expected may sometimes make music boring, but it also makes it easy to digest. Endless Wellness manages to make unpredictability consumable. A talent that is conducive to increasing their popularity.

Echoes of the early Tocotronic and other rebellious pop works about the unbearableness of the world and youthful anger at petty-bourgeois all sorts cannot be denied. Lyrically, “Domino Days” doesn’t come across as sophisticated, but it’s bright, unpretentious and full of meaning.

The album closes with “We shall never be so alone again.” So maybe the protagonists of the songs will manage to take on the emotional risk after all. A sometimes unwieldy, but at the same time comfortingly thoughtful diagnosis of the present.