“This band is not about war itself. It’s about people in war.”
This is Noise, the Bamberg, Germany-based extreme-metal musician writing World War I-themed music as Kanonenfieber. He’s clarifying the purpose of his project, which draws inspiration from the letters of soldiers and families impacted by the unremitting brutality of the Great War.
Across a handful of singles and a pair of albums — most recently on 2024’s Die Urkatastrophe — he’s injected those tales into a melancholic blast of melodic, blackened death metal to conjure the grimness of military combat, rather than glorify it.
The full scope of Noise’s creative vision is on display during Kanonenfieber’s explosive live performances, which are filled with martial pageantry and fiery theatrics that will raise eyebrows among the uninitiated.
Their stage is flanked with cannons and barbed-wire fences, while the PA pumps recordings of WWI speeches above the group’s music. Each member wears era-appropriate German army regalia and a black mask to conceal their identity in symbolic solidarity with the Unknown Soldier. The band are committed to their anonymity offstage as well, sharing limited personal details and using only stage names.
Noise — who writes and records most of the music on his own and performs live as Kanonenfieber’s frontman — leads the charge in a pointed pickelhaube helmet like a high-ranking general, and scorches the air with a fully-functional flamethrower. His lyrics, which are mostly sung in German, dourly reflect troops dying in the trenches, yet sensory-overloaded concertgoers are enthusiastically singing along to his narrative death marches.
“If you haven’t seen a Kanonenfieber show yet, it might seem a bit cringey to have these unforms on. But if you have seen a show, you know exactly what we are up to — it’s all anti-war,” Noise explains, likening their performances to cautionary, macabre musical theater about the madness of war. “There’s a lot of emotions transported through stage props, and a lot of acting. I’m dying onstage. I come back as Death, [while wearing] a skeleton mask.”
Kanonenfieber are clearly cutting a distinctive path through the contemporary death-metal scene with their extreme aesthetic — and people are taking notice.
Since forming in 2020, they’ve gained praise while performing on the European festival circuit and on tours supporting Amon Amarth. (They’ve yet to play the States but are eyeing 2025 for their U.S. live debut.) Black Dahlia Murder’s late frontman Trevor Strnad guested on the band’s 2022 single “The Yankee Division March,” a song where he and Noise sang from the perspectives of U.S. and German soldiers facing off on a French battlefield. Last fall, Die Urkatastrophe (the band’s first album for Century Media Records) hit No. 3 on the German album charts. The group are on track to reach a global audience of metal fans, yet the roots of Noise’s war obsession remain profoundly close to home.
Speaking with Revolver, Noise explains that he first became interested in the subject of war through a mix of video games and movies. He learned a little bit about WWI at school but recalls that his history classes put greater emphasis on studying the staggering horrors of the Second World War.
Then one day he discovered that his grandmother had saved her father’s journal from when he was fighting on the frontlines of WWI, except it was handwritten in an outdated form of German script that was nearly indecipherable. Undeterred and eager to learn more about his great-grandfather — who died in combat around 1916 — Noise and his “hobby historian” friend had the diary translated. That’s when he discovered that his ancestor was pretty excited to enter the conflict.
“I guess it was [written with] the same enthusiasm that was going through the whole German public — with this mentality of being a hero, going to war and returning with some magnificent Iron Crosses,” he says of the tone of his great-grandfather’s writings. “Everyone was super hyped for the war back then.”
Noise began studying letters from other soldiers of the era, on both sides of the conflict, and was compelled to build the Kanonenfieber project around their harrowing experiences. Noise recalls being particularly struck by one 18-year-old German soldier’s correspondence. The man’s writing initially conveyed a sense of puffed-up nationalistic pride — until he reached the Eastern Front. As the terrifying explosions surrounded him, “his letters became dark,” says Noise. The young fighter’s anxieties are summed up on “Die Feuertaufe,” the first song on Kanonenfieber’s 2021 debut album, Menschenmühle.
Noise continues to hone in on that dread throughout Die Urkatastrophe. Take “Der Maulwurf” (which translates to “The Mole”), a trudging doom-swing based on the psychological trauma inflicted on a miner tunneling underground as bombs were dropping overhead.
Despite Noise’s war-ridden lyrics and the band’s dramatic military aesthetic, the masked musician says he’s actually subverting jingoistic storytelling conventions. There are no heroic sagas to be found within Kanonenfieber’s music, he says, and no sacrosanct ideology — just “death and decay” and “the hard, dry, horrific truth” about war.
“I will always be clear in interviews and official statements that this band is 100 percent apolitical. You have to look at this band as a documentation,” explains Noise. He pauses. “It’s not about leaders [or] who won whatever. It’s just about the human beings dying in the mud.”
Stephanie Rifkin
While Kanonenfieber is focused primarily on WWI, Noise has also used the band to reflect on modern conflicts, specifically the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. In 2022, he released “Stop the War” to raise funds for aid workers in the region. Three years later that battle continues — as well as multiple other conflicts and humanitarian crises across the globe. The First World War ended more than a century ago, but the war machine keeps grinding on. “It’s like a drop of water on a hot stone, me writing that song,” he sums up bleakly of his charity single.
Still, Noise is committed to continue spreading his anti-war message by amplifying the struggles of soldiers and civilians in his art. It’s heavy subject material, and Kanonenfieber’s leader admits that he occasionally experiences a kind of emotional “shell shock” after reading so many heart-breaking accounts.
“Writing the lyrics is always a very brutal process,” Noise confirms, adding that he spent eight weeks bombarding himself with various forms of WWI media during the making of Die Urkatastrophe. “There is nothing going on in my brain besides war, war and more war. That fucks your mood up in a big way,” he confesses. “During that time period… let’s say people don’t like me that much because I’m very negative, and quite sad.”
Revolver asks how long he can sustain the intense process of studying and singing about war casualties. “There is no other way around it,” he posits. “If I want to keep on creating Kanonenfieber albums, I have to put myself through this.”
So, for now, Noise and Kanonenfieber will continue to charge forward with their bombastic, theatrical and thought-provoking art. And as they do, Noise hopes that one solemn, overarching message sticks with their growing fanbase: “It’s simple,” he says bluntly. “War is terrible. There’s no reason to have humans dying in a conflict. That’s all I want people to take away from it.”