All sounds like a dream to me … Destroyer „Kaputt“

Destroyer
„Kaputt“
(Merge)

There are two fundamental principles for Kaput magazine. First—and most importantly for Linus and me—we don’t hold meetings. Second: We don’t care about page views. Both principles are directly linked to our experiences over the past few years at Intro, during which the number of daily “Jour fixes” (since then a loaded term) increased absurdly, and the focus was often on performance and click-through rates—though, of course, this was never put on the agenda by the editors.

I bring this up because, at these—let’s call them staff gatherings—we were repeatedly told that the Destroyer album “Kaputt”—to which we dedicated the cover of Intro 193—had performed disastrously poorly in Germany. The implicit message: How could we have possibly put such a niche product on the cover?

Intro: Destroyer (Artwork: Holger Risse)

Of course, we never read the emails with the previous week’s performance figures—let alone let such jibes impress or influence us. On the contrary: we even convinced the in-house Melt! Festival team to invite Destroyer to the festival in 2012. The show featured our fantastic yellow covers designed by Holger Risse.

None of that—Destroyer, the album “Kaputt,” the debates surrounding it—was on Linus’s or my mind when we chose the name for our magazine. But subconsciously, it certainly resonated. After all, it fits perfectly with the subtitle: “Magazine for Insolvency & Pop.” Dan Bejar, on the other hand, once dedicated an entire album, “Thief,” to the nefarious instincts of the music industry. But enough of the preamble—let’s dive into Kaputt.

Dan Bejar hails from Vancouver, Canada, and has been working on his idiosyncratic indie rock since the early 1990s. He himself describes Destroyer’s style as “European Blues.” That sounds nice, but it only hits the mark halfway, because his music also contains a lot of classic US indie sound—you can hear Pavement, Guided by Voices, or Built to Spill—though always infused with blue-eyed soul. But the “Europe” reference probably refers more to his lyric collages, which indeed clearly position him on his own ground, rooted in European tradition.

A few examples: The line “I remix horses” in “The Ignoramus of Love” (from the album “Dan’s Boogie”) alludes to Bill Callahan’s “I Break Horses” and Patti Smith’s “Horses.” In “In the Morning” (from the album “Ken”), he borrows a line from DeBarges’ “Rhythm of the Night.” On “Kaputt,” meanwhile, the song “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” was created when Bejar rearranged text cards that the artist Kara Walker had designed especially for him. The result was an eight-and-a-half-minute collage about what it means to live as a Black woman in the U.S. after 400 years of oppression:
„Harmless little negress / You’ve got to say yes to another excess / Let’s go for a ride today“ oder „Enter through the exit / And exit through the entrance / When you can.“

Other literary influences: Ezra Pound, Camus, Shakespeare, Rilke, Franz Wright, Frederick Seidel … But Bejar draws inspiration from both friends and foes—such as Ronald Reagan, whose speech he quotes in “Evil Empire.”

Despite this distinct authorial voice, Bejar insists on viewing Destroyer as a band in which all members contribute their talents. On “Kaputt” (released in January 2011 on Merge), this means specifically: All songs were written by Bejar; he sings and plays guitar; Scott Morgan contributes drums and electronics; John Collins plays bass, guitar, and synthesizer.

“Kaputt” marks a turning point in Destroyer’s discography. Previously rather raw, it’s now disco-soft-rock, jazzy, and ambient. Later albums did indeed follow that were more ambient-oriented, in the spirit of Jon Hassell or David Sylvian (Japan). On “Kaputt,” however, we hear soft rock in the spirit of Prefab Sprout, Roxy Music, or Fleetwood Mac. The album opens with “Chinatown,” naturally a reference to Roman Polanski’s classic film. The song immediately envelops you with bouncy synths, gentle drums, a crooning voice, that unmistakable saxophone sound, and lyrics like: “You can’t believe / The way the wind’s talking to the sea / I heard that someone said it before, I don’t care …”

The contrast between dreamy music and often brutally cynical lyrics creates a constant sense of unease on *Kaputt*. While the music pretends to be a world full of harmony and optimism, the lyrics are dripping with abysses. Take, for example, the downright upbeat-sounding “Song for America,” whose lyrics oscillate somewhere between Dadaist crypticism and clear poetry: “I wrote a song for America / They told me it was clever / Jessica’s gone oan vacation / On the dark side of town forever …”
In the cover story at the time (written by Sebastian Ingenhoff), Bejar—who, as you might guess, studied literature—explained that the album title refers to Curzio Malaparte’s novel of the same name, “Kaputt”—one of the great anti-war books of the 20th century; in it, Malaparte depicts the horrors of World War II from the perspective of a war correspondent on the Eastern Front. Bejar’s favorite author, by the way, is Roberto Bolaño. Not a bad choice either.

The aforementioned Melt! performance, by the way, was beautiful. It was Sunday, everyone in that gently hazy state typical of the festival’s fourth day. The sun was shining brightly, and the songs from “Kaputt” triggered all the still-subtly circulating neurotransmitters. Perfect bliss.

It’s hard to believe that Destroyer sort of slipped my mind after that. I kept listening to the songs from *Kaputt*, but their later albums somehow passed me by. Until I was recently invited over for dinner at Friedrich Kunath’s place—he put on the new album *Dan’s Boogie*, released in 2025, and told me about a book project with Dan Bejar. Immediately, that cloud of happiness was back. The album picks up seamlessly where “Kaputt” left off—at least that’s how it feels—fitting for a world that has since only maneuvered itself deeper into a mess. In that sense, we need Bejar’s anti-war pop (which Sebastian Ingenhoff, by the way, called an “apocalypse soundtrack” back then) all the more urgently today as a place of longing where we can let ourselves go.

We’ll let Dan Bejar have the last word, with a quote from the title track “Kaputt.” It’s also a perfect way to wrap up our “25 from 2000–2025” series:

“An ode to the old school rock-and-roll lifestyle. / Wasting your days / Chasing some girls, alright / Chasing cocaine / Through the backrooms of the world / All night … Sounds, Smash Hits / Melody Maker, NME / All sound like a dream to me … Step out of your toga / And into the ocean / Look, they got your prints on the fog …”

Thomas Venker