NNHMN have spent the last few years working a single idea: that desire and grief run on the same current. Opera of Lust & the Art of Sorrow II, released 27 August 2026 on the Berlin duo’s own K-Dreams Records, is the second instalment of that idea, and the more physical of the series.
Lee Margot writes and sings. Michal Laudarg builds the music and mixes it. The arrangements have got glossier and more house-adjacent since Circle of Doom; her lyrics stay fixated on bodies, thresholds and the small cruelties of wanting something. Opener “Touch Me” sets the terms straight away. A four-on-the-floor pulse and a run of Laudarg’s melodic clusters carry Margot through a lyric about fever, hunger and someone who leaves without saying anything. It plays like a Donna Summer record left out in the rain – the disco engine kept intact but the warmth curled into need.
“Gangster” follows with a skipping arpeggio and a narrator who bristles at the word in the title while conducting his business like a man doing his weekly shopping. It is the record’s driest joke, delivered straight-faced. Margot’s vocal keeps enough distance from the lyric that the humour survives. “Turn Me On” pushes harder, stacking verbs (loving, bleeding, flying, falling) until the accumulation itself makes the point. Laudarg answers with a high-end riff that cuts against the plushness underneath.
The record slows the pulse without losing the nerve. “Say My Name” places its repeated request for recognition amid images of a sleeping God and a city in distress. “Strange Love” goes further into that colder register: rain on skin; ice flowers in veins; a lyric about loving without love that reads like a diagnosis. It is the EP’s most electroclash-indebted moment – spare where “Touch Me” was full.
“Mannequin” is the outlier, brighter than anything else on the EP, its lyric fixed on the fantasy of being smooth and untouched rather than flesh that keeps failing its owner. “Cold Like Steel” retreats into a slower, nocturnal mode that belongs to the project’s “Art of Sorrow” side – it is all waiting cars and roads at night. The closer, “Fck All Wars”, makes a serious point about love: it is a protest song dressed as dark disco; a repeated, blunt line trading the EP’s usual obliqueness for something closer to a placard.
Across eight tracks (plus a live rendering of “Strange Love” that closes the digital edition), NNHMN sound like a band who have decided that catharsis and choreography are not opposites. Opera of Lust & the Art of Sorrow II is available now on vinyl and digital download through NNHMN’s Bandcamp.
