Jessica Weiss takes time out from her dream-pop trio Fear Of Men to unveil her solo project New German Cinema.

I was drawn to this song by the artist name, New German Cinema, having discovered film makers like Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog in the early ’80s.

Jessica Weiss shares my passion (though she must have discovered them later), and has adopted the name for the release of her solo debut, Pain Will Polish Me.

This song, Being Dead, is the first fruit of an album recorded over a five-year period between Europe and California during breaks between recordings with her Brighton-based dream-pop trio Fear Of Men.

During that time Weiss, who has long been fascinated by the seam between pop and theory, art and feeling, also finished a Masters in Early Modern Literature at Oxford and started a PhD.

Moving countries and jobs many times, she pieced together her songs of devotion as destruction and release, creating a body of work she calls “a meditation on love as both mirror and undoing told through vignettes inspired by the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.” 

Sessions produced by Alex De Groot (Cate Le Bon, Zola Jesus) were recorded between London, Los Angeles and Berlin, inspired by dinner conversations about the city’s buried history, tracing the outlines of love and loss, identity and dissolution.

“Germany’s history is everywhere, but it’s unsaid,” Weiss observes. “Fassbinder brought it into view. I wanted to approach the same sense of unease through sound.” 

Brilliant video, too, filmed in moody monochrome amid the catacombs.