Martin Brugger announces new album ‘The Shell’ and shares the first track

MARTIN BRUGGER

ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM

THE SHELL

OUT 26 JUNE VIA SQUAMA RECORDINGS

Shares new single ‘Knees, Hands, Shoulders, Teeth’

LISTEN HERE

Photo credit: Tonda Bardehle

Five years after his debut Music For Video Stores, Squama co-founder Martin Brugger returns with a new album, The Shell, out 26 June via Squama.

The album is introduced by ‘Knees, Hands, Shoulders, Teeth’, a track built from layered field recordings and tactile instrumentation, where fragments of lived experience are folded into looping patterns and soft, dissonant textures. Drawing from a recording of a tabla heard at a Brooklyn sleepover concert, the piece carries a quiet sense of motion and memory, hovering between the intimate and the abstract.

On The Shell, field recordings, noisy synths and lo-fi folk guitars give way to a veiled, dreamlike sensibility. Sparse arrangements and an eerie atmosphere mirror an internal dialogue, tracing the tension between hesitation and release, fear and fulfilment.

The album’s title is drawn from a passage in Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Grand Hotel, which resonated with Brugger during its creation, capturing the idea that fear and pleasure are intrinsically bound. For Brugger, it became a reflection of the creative process itself, the necessity of moving through uncertainty in order to arrive at something meaningful.

After the indie success of Music For Video Stores, Brugger found himself at an impasse. A completed follow-up record was ultimately scrapped, its foundations feeling disconnected from his own motivations. “It was as if I had created it for someone else,” he reflects. What followed was a period of retreat and recalibration, an attempt to reconnect with music as a personal and instinctive practice.

Much of The Shell was written in solitude in Brugger’s Munich studio. Returning to a nylon string guitar once owned by his grandmother, he began working through simple melodic ideas, approaching the instrument with a renewed sense of curiosity. These sketches were layered with recordings captured on his phone, an ice cream truck melody, distant voices, fragments of performance, each carrying its own history into the compositions.

Working with analogue equipment, tape echoes, preamps and pedals, Brugger embraced a process rooted in imperfection and immediacy. The result is a body of work that feels both fragile and grounded, where sound is treated as memory, texture and gesture.

“Listening to the music on this album, I can relive the emotions that were put into it at a certain point in time and that gives me the greatest pleasure. I can say that I’ve been honest in making it and that’s all I can give and it’s what I know now matters most to me.”