AlbumRelease date:
23.09.2022
Alphaville, Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg
Eternally Yours
Alphaville – Eternally Yours Alphaville’s greatest hits from 40 years of the band’s history, in completely new arrangements recorded with the German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg Alphaville, Germany’s biggest synth-pop export and creator of the legendary 80s anthems “Big in Japan”, “Sounds like a Melody” and “Forever Young”, has decided to go symphonic. The band is doing things on the grand scale and catapulting the band’s 40 years of greatest hits out of the orbit of synthesizers and rhythm machines into the world of the human sound machine, the symphony orchestra. “Eternally Yours” is more, much more, than a mere translation of the songs into the sound spectrum of a great orchestra. What it amounts to, rather, is a symbiosis of Marian Gold’s unique vocal capacities, the original Alphaville sound and the majestic power and rich timbres of the concert-hall-sized German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg. “Eternally Yours” is about the everlasting theme of endurance and evanescence. The lyrics of songs from the past four decades were written predominantly by Marian Gold himself. One central theme for Alphaville and Marian Gold has always been the dream: “We really get around quite a lot, we’ve played almost everywhere, in our heads and out of our heads. All that goes into our music, into the idea of what Alphaville could be. It is like a never-ending dream. Those who hear our music hear fragments of this dream.” The completely new title track reads like a long letter of farewell. The fact is that except for the refrain, all the lines come from Shakespeare’s Sonnets. “I didn’t write a single line of my own for this song, all the words and all the ideas come from Shakespeare. All I did was recompile them and minimally adjust them, so as to make them more singable for me.” “All 23 numbers on this album have been essentially clarified by their arrangement, they’re stripped clean, released, set free. Their true nature has been revealed.” Marian Gold, frontman of the band, and his two arrangers Max Knoth and Christian Lohr have given this album the sonic ambience that matches the musical content of its songs. The songs don’t sound overblown, either, they’re not pushed beyond their limits – on the contrary, the album has such natural, warm, even familiar tones that listening to it, you wonder why there haven’t been more symphonic arrangements of Alphaville songs in the past. Marian Gold goes so far as to say: “When I hear it, ‘Eternally Yours’ really does sound as if it were actually the first Alphaville album – except that for forty years, it lay unreleased. We simply didn’t have access to an orchestra in those days, we ‘only’ had synthesizers and rhythm machines.” Alphaville's new studio album "Eternally Yours" is available in a variety of different physical formats. Find all products currently available here. The double CD contains the complete album with all 23 tracks, including the strip-down versions and single edits of the tracks "Big in Japan", "Sounds like a Melody" and "Forever Young". In addition to that, a booklet gives insights into the lyrics of the songs. The album is also available as a black vinyl edition. Three 180g vinyls in padded inner sleeves are packaged in a 300g gatefold. As a special and limited format, there is also the Colored Vinyl GOLD Edition available. Both vinyl versions contain the entire album plus three bonus tracks and a vinyl-format insert with lyrics. The Collectors Box offers the complete insight into Alphaville's "Eternally Yours": it contains the double CD and the Colored Vinyl GOLD Edition bundled in one box. Additionally – and exclusively in the Collectors Box – you can enjoy "Eternally Yours" in immersive Dolby Atmos sound via the Alphaville USB stick. Furthermore – and for the first time ever in 15 years – the Eternally Yours MC allows you to hear Alphaville on cassette. A large-format booklet with a track-by-track description by Marian Gold, texts by author Max Dax and photographic insights into the recording offer further exciting insights into the album and the history of Alphaville. The entire box can be stowed away in the Alphaville tote bag.

Alphaville
Stylistically, Alphaville started their career with synthesizer-heavy, juvenile synth-pop that fitted perfectly into the mood of the early 80s.
1984 saw the release of their first single "Big in Japan", which, together with the subsequent songs "Sounds like a Melody", "Forever Young" and the eponymous debut album, made the band one of the most successful German groups of the decade worldwide. But this meteoric rise to the top soon found its first victim: in 1985 Frank Mertens had had enough of the media hype and left the band, fed up. He was replaced by keyboardist and guitarist Rick Echolette. With their following albums "Afternoons in Utopia", "The Breathtaking Blue" and "Prostitute", Alphaville moved further and further away from the simply structured pop songs of the early days and turned to more complex musical narratives. At the same time, Gold developed into a versatile singer whose style and stage presence were reminiscent of Scott Walker, Billy MacKenzie or Freddy Mercury. After a three-year break, during which two solo albums by Gold were produced ("So Long Celeste" and "United") and after Echolette's departure, Alphaville celebrated a comeback in 1997 with their 5th album "Salvation", which at the same time represented a return to the sound of their beginnings. This was followed in 1999 by "Dreamscapes", a gigantic compilation of 8 CDs that represented the band's musical development over the last 20 years and consisted almost exclusively of unreleased material. Their world tour in 2000 resulted in the only concert album to date, "Stark Naked and Absolutely Live".
In the years 2000-2002, Alphaville – in the meantime expanded to include the British keyboardist and producer Martin Lister – moved all of their then current music production to the internet, where an online audience could follow the creation of their songs live from the first embryonic stages to the fully produced song. This experiment resulted in the 8th studio album "CrazyShow" in 2003. In the following years, Alphaville concentrated on extended tours; in between, Gold acted as singer and co-writer in some avant-garde projects of his long-time friend and colleague Klaus Schulze.
In 2009, Alphaville switched from their previous record label Warner Brothers to Universal Music and released album No.9, "Catching Rays on Giant", in November 2010, whose conservative, melodic pop sound catapulted them back into the European Top Ten, followed by the last studio production to date, "Strange Attractor", which, compared to its predecessor, came from the band's rather darker sonic realms. In 2019 and 2021, the first three Alphaville albums were re-released as remasters with elaborate artwork and a wealth of additional material. Furthermore, Gold dedicated himself to numerous solo projects, so he not only took part in the popular TV format "Sing meinen Song" ("Sing my song"), he also cooperated with artists such as Renard, Schiller and Westbam. Also during this time and shortly after the beginning of the Corona pandemic in early 2020, Alphaville released the so-called "Corona Songs" free of charge via the internet: 17 works consisting of remixes, demos and brand-new songs, reminiscent of the CrazyShow project of 2003 in the spontaneity of their creation. In January 2022, after 40 years of band history, the time was ripe for a very special undertaking: The re-recording of Alphaville's greatest hits complete with newly composed songs in symphonic arrangements.
The triple album "Eternally Yours" will premiere on the Neue Meister label (Edel) in autumn 2022. The German Film Orchestra Babelsberg has been won for the production, with its great experience between pop, film and classical music the perfect musical partner for this project. A tour of the world's major concert halls is then planned for spring 2023. At the same time, the recordings for album No. 12 "Thunderbaby" are in full swing. The premiere is expected in summer or autumn 2023.
"Never forget your dreams" (Marian Gold)
More releases






