John Maus - Later Than You Think

In the organizer's words:

John Mouse

Later Than You Think

Presented by Emerged Agency
19.11.2025 Cologne, Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld
Admission 19:00 hrs | Start: 20:00 hrs

A man stands alone, his long brown bangs wet with sweat. He runs up and down the stage, runs on the spot, ruffles his hair and beats himself with his microphone. Powerful bass, mechanical drums and heavenly synthesizers stream from the loudspeakers around him. As he opens his mouth to sing, his eyes widen dramatically and the tendons in his neck strain with exertion, revealing - in all authenticity - the "hysterical body". The man is John Maus, a 21st century philosopher and musician who has become a mythical figure over the last 20 years. His unshakeable belief in the emotional power of sound, his deep feeling and serious reflection, his arrangements that sound just as good in a club as they do at a symposium, his bizarre interpretations of popular music clichés and his legendary live shows have inspired a whole host of followers. His new album, "Later Than You Think", out September 26 on Young, is the clearest expression of this ethic yet.

Maus' intensity is not a role he plays. The man behind the myth is just as passionate as the man behind the microphone - brilliant, obsessive, almost overly earnest and full of deep insights that he expresses with every word. In his work and his words, he constantly fights against the status quo: the Mickey Mouse Club, Coca-Cola and all the institutions that reduce culture to its lowest common denominator. In the midst of all this, he has managed to infuse his music with a dark sense of humor. From the notion of sex with cars in 2006 to his dry "Your pets are gonna die" eleven years later, his satirical imagination has always been part of his seemingly austere aesthetic. Great artists, after all, must avoid the pitfalls of taking themselves too seriously.

Between four insightful albums, Maus wrote a book-length dissertation on communication technologies as mechanisms of social control and built up an arsenal of analog synthesizers in his basement. These achievements were the result of a deep struggle. "You can't write a word, so you lock yourself up / So they say you're losing your mind," he sings in "Later Than You Think". It's a creative block he endured every time he picked up a pen, "weary and burdened and ridden around like a donkey with a bit in its mouth by a trillion demons," as he told Henry Wallis in an insightful episode of the Forms podcast. Embroiled in a spiritual battle - between the perfect and the good, but also between good and evil - he eventually found a way forward. But to understand Maus' path to redemption, we must first know his path to rock bottom.

In late 2017, Maus released Screen Memories, his first album since 2011, and married the love of his life. In 2018, he went on tour with a band for the first time, with his brother Joe playing bass. But things quickly went off the rails. On a tour of Europe the following year, Joe died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition. Then his uncle, who had been like a second father to him, died, and in 2019 his aunt followed him. The stress jeopardized his marriage to the point of divorce. "Let me through," he repeats pleadingly in "Later Than You Think".

"I needed someone or something to guide me through the veil of tears," he says today. "Let me through to the peace that earth can't give." He turned to faith. Raised as a Catholic in rural Minnesota, he had always been interested in spirituality from a philosophical perspective. After a quarter of a century, he returned to what he knew - going to church on Sundays, celebrating the liturgy and "waiting for the glorious appearing of the Lord who will redeem the world". Slowly, he began to put the pieces of his shattered life back together again.

Maus went off the rails again in 2021. On January 6, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to discuss composing the score for a new film by director Alex Moyer. He then accompanied Moyer to record footage of the protests at the Capitol. They left long before the situation got out of hand. A video showing Maus in front of the Capitol went viral on the internet, and rightly outraged people called for his removal. In response, he published a 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI entitled "With Burning Concern" against Nazi ideology, an act he saw as a clear condemnation of the right. Looking back, he realizes that this was not the case. "I should have made it clearer that I am absolutely against Trumpism," he says. "It wasn't as clear a condemnation as it should have been." Fans called him a fascist, and one festival even removed him from its program. He understood that. Ashamed that he had subscribed to principles with which he disagreed so fundamentally, he retreated into seclusion. Since then, he has rebuilt himself.

In 2023, he began writing again for the first time since the mid-2010s - one song a week for 20 weeks. Every day he descended into his basement studio to work on new music. Forty tracks later, Later Than You Think was ready to be shaped into a record. The result is a return to form, 16 songs that break new ground while harkening back to the many phases of his career - the minimalist synth-punk anomalies of 2006 and 2007's Songs and Love Is Real, the lush avant-pop pieces of 2011's We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves and, in some cases, the symphonically ambitious ventures of Screen Memories.

"Because we built it ... we can watch it go up in flames," sings Maus to live bass and a cybernetic drumbeat at the beginning of the new album. "Because we killed it ... we'll watch it go up in flames." While writing the song, Maus - who was born and raised outside of Minneapolis - reflected on the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, particularly the haunting image of the Twin Cities ablaze in a blaze of righteous revolt.

The songs on "Later Than You Think" are emotionally complex, alternately stoic and ecstatic. "Here's your time to disappear," he sings at one point, but that disappearance is ultimately a good thing. The death of the self, of the overweening ego, brings us closer to the eternal. Elsewhere, in tracks like "Came & Got," "Let Me Through" and "Reconstruct Your Life," he sings abstractly about his recent struggles, his tone ranging from despair to resilience.

Religious themes and iconography appear throughout the album, shaping the emotional and aesthetic atmosphere. In lead single "I Hate Antichrist", Maus repeats the title over and over again over a pulsing drum beat, a sinister bass line and a high-pitched organ synthesizer - the sound of which is eerie and sacred - until the repetition becomes a mantra that propels the track into a state of spiritual intensity and transcendent contemplation. In the middle of the song, this is interrupted by a sampled scream: "FBI! Open the door!" "It's about the police coming to get you," he says, describing the track as "Cop Killer Part II". ("Cop Killer," a controversial song from the 2011 album Pitiless, is a metaphorical call to arms, a call to both fight the powerful and kill the cop in our own heads. It's a concept he wrote about that same year in "Theses on Punk Rock", an essay he wrote while in college. "Punk rock, like all truth, is anarchistic," he wrote, "[and] sees itself as a disruption of the police.")

Later Than You Think contains two Latin hymns, one as a secular pop song, the other as Gregorian chant. He learned the latter technique during his studies in an abbey of Benedictine monks in the diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma. "There's something radically antagonistic about it," he says, referring to the way the monks withdraw from society to chant seven times a day, from 4am to 1am. He links this action to the leftist concept of destituent power, as expressed in Bartleby the Scrivener's simple phrase "I'd rather not". The album title itself is a memento mori that orthodox monks used to carve into skulls: "It's later than you think. Therefore make haste to do the work of God."

Christian theology is not the only ideological system Maus explores on the album; good deeds can also be secular, he says. "Tous Les Gens Qui Sont Ici Sont D'ici", he sings at one point, quoting a phrase by French philosopher Alain Badiou, which translates into German as "All the people who are here are from here". It is a call for the acceptance of outsiders, a clear rejection of xenophobia, performed over motorized drums.

Later, in "Pick It Up", an unofficial sequel to 2007's "Do Your Best", he sings of a down-on-his-luck city dweller "sitting in a corner" waiting for a friend to show him an ounce of kindness. "We can never be reminded enough that we should care for lonely people," says Maus. One way he does this is through art: "People come up to me and tell me at concerts that my music has helped them a lot, and that really humbles me," he says. "The truth is the truth," he concludes, no matter where it comes from.

Before the album quietly fades out with a Gregorian chant, Maus drops "Losing Your Mind," a song about descending into madness. The track is split down the middle by an unsettling noise sequence he synthesized from scratch, an interruption he compares to Joseph Haydn's "Surprise Symphony." It's not the only moment on the album where he's used pure data to create chaos. In the middle of "Disappears" we are shocked back to life by a disorienting phasing effect created as a spectrum drawing. The image he sketched on his spectrograph was the sign of the cross.

To truly understand Later Than You Think - and Maus' entire body of work - you have to travel back in time. Even in his poppiest moments, he has incorporated elements of centuries-old music, focusing on the counterpoint of early 18th century composers such as Bach and Handel. Here he goes back to the 10th century, to a time when Gregorian chant was the only form of music recognized by the Catholic Church. At the same time, he jumps back to the 60s and 70s, when the first modular synthesizers appeared. This fusion of medieval harmony and 20th century technology is most evident in "Theotokos", where booming drums and a barely audible bass underpin an ambient synth organ and monophonic chant - a slow march through the digital liturgy.

Later Than You Think contains a multitude of elements - the lush and the sparse, the sacred and the profane, minimalist discipline and maximalist indulgence, counterpoint and simple pop harmony. But at the heart of the tumult, one thing is clear: John Maus' music insists on the power of genuine emotion and radical sincerity. He grapples intensely with the crisis of modern life, yearning for truth and transcendence in an age of irony, alienation and political decay. His new project is a radical awakening - driven by faith, acceptance and the urgent conviction that time is of the essence and this is the moment of truth.