The Formative Years

Slime 

When it comes to quintessential German punk bands, no list would be complete without Slime from Hamburg.

Founded in 1979, they evolved from playing rudimentarily structured and simplistic songs modelled after late-seventies British punk rock a la Clash and The Damned to a band that carved their own lane centred around dedicated more complex song structures with layered, less one-dimensional and politically relevant lyrical content with a deeply embedded anti-fascist message at its core. 

Slime’s oeuvre not only left a massive imprint on the Deutschpunk scene at large for generations to come but also created an idiosyncratic range of emblematic “call to action” anti-authoritarian  sloganeering that not only has become integral part of the vocabulary of the German leftist autonomist scene. but also resulted in tangible actions at protests and rallies.

As a teenager, the fact that quite a few of Slime's early and controversial songs were censored and the band subject to being prosecuted by the official censoring body in Germany, i.e. Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors, exerted a magnetic pull and set me on a mission to secure the original releases, learn the lyrics by heart and let them infuse the shaping of my worldview.

During the early days of the punk movement where messaging and positioning was still very diffuse and vague, Slime was one of the pivotal politically radical bands that grew from simple riffing, punk anthems and stereotypical clichéd content to rising above the sea of their epigones by evolving to writing more musically demanding and complex songs and the inclusion of more sophisticated metaphorical  lyrics courtesy of Slime’s drummer, i.e. Stephan Maler, dealing with governmental repression, xenophobia and anti-war sentiments. 

The first three albums remain timeless classics and cement Slime’s legacy: