Yello – Timelab

Yello – Timelab

Timeless, and yet always fresh: utterly oblivious of any wiles of the pop business, Planet Yello turns on its orbit, plunging us with every new sighting into a world where past and future are one and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysos and Philip K. Dick.

«To the future, through the past», declares Dieter Meier, Yello’s resident alchemist of words. Starting with the title, their new album Timelab is a perfect illustration of this maxim. When it came to choosing a thematically apt title for their new batch of songs, Boris Blank remembered an old and unused song fragment stored away in his massive sound archive under that handle. «Exactly as Dieter has it …», says Blank: «You can’t invent yourself anew every day. You constantly dig out things from the past and they carry you forward, step by step».

Something that hasn’t changed since Yello’s earliest days is their working method. Blank, the craftsman, sits in his monk’s cell of a studio all day long, sculpting and honing his parallel worlds of sound until they satisfy his sense of perfection. Meier, the dedicated citizen of the world, then arrives to uncover the tales of anarchic romance, absurd robberies and dadaist adventure hidden away in these creations. «I’ve never needed more than twenty minutes to come up with my lyrics», says Meier. «When I listen to Boris’s music, the words just flow. Finding such a harmonious symbiosis in life is a great privilege».

Boris Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from countless small elements, a combination of freshly minted samples and fragments from his archive. Any Yello track is therefore by definition old and new at the same time. Around the Sun - the first single taken from Timelab - places a Meier recording from the early days in a contemporary sound context. Break Out combines a blast of classic Blank brass with staccato Meier for a rousing call to action against laziness. Spin Back re-imagines Spinning My Mind from the last Yello album Point (released in 2000) in a 1980s costume. Streets of Berlin references The Race and was recorded for the forthcoming next series of Babylon Berlin. With Dieter Meier’s bravura spoken word performance of Zebra, Timelab reaches into the realms of science fiction: the text is a letter written in the 1970s by SF author Philip K. Dick. Sprinkled throughout the album we also have the three dreamily wistful songs contributed by a couple of old Yello friends, guest singers Heidi Happy and Malia. «Time doesn’t really exist in Yello music», says Boris Blank. Or, as Dieter Meier has it: «To the future, through the past».

Tracklist:
Around The Sun
Break Out
You And Me (Featuring Heidi Happy)
Saturday Morning
Unbelievable
Dancing Flame (Featuring Malia)
About Time
Spin Back
Beautiful You (Featuring Heidi Happy)
Streets Of Berlin
China Blue
Burning Dream
Midnight Traffic
Zebra

Label: Polydor
Released: 2026