Good news on the horizon for fans of sad German electronic-influenced pop! The Notwist have plans to release The Devil, You + Me, the follow-up to their fantastic 2002 album, Neon Golden, this spring. The band has actually been putting out music since the late ’80s, but Neon Golden was the record that brought them out into the great shining beacon of relative indie stardom. It’s not that the members of the Notwist have just been sitting on their hands all this time — they collaborated with Themselves in 13 + God, Micha Acher is in Ms. John Soda with Stefanie Böhm and runs his own studio, his brother Markus plays guitar in Lali Puna — but there’s certainly been some anticipation in regards to their next output. Finally, a sign of life. And if it proves to be indicative of all that The Devil, You + Me is, good things are in store.

Though Markus’s vocals are half-whispered in “Good Lies,” and often sound as if he’s too forlorn to get all his words out, they carry the song; it’s their very fragility that makes them so alluring, and so strong. His lyrics are both thoughtfully detailed (”We carry them home with us/To our bedside table and our coffee sets”) and catholic (”Let’s just imitate the real, until we find a better one”), as they lay themselves out and repeat throughout the piece. While Neon Golden relied heavily on what soon became the prototypical indie-electronic percussion (the soft blip, the chirp), here the band uses a bass drum and bass guitar to keep the eighth notes constant and steady as the guitars and soft keyboards play above. “Good Lies” is immediately melancholic and distantly gorgeous, the kind of thing that strikes you unawares and, once it hits, is difficult to dislodge. If the rest of The Devil, You + Me is as strong as this, the Notwist may not have the leisure of taking six years before their next release appears. Which isn’t a bad thing at all.