Even before hearing a single note of their music, Schwarz Dont Crack demand attention. The product of one black American and one white German, the name stands for “black don’t crack.” In some ways, it’s a marriage of their two cultures, their language, and their relationship.
“Ahmad suggested the name Black Dont Crack,” the group’s producer, Sebastian Kreis, explains. “But he also seemed amused by the German word ‘schwarz.’ So that’s what stuck. Several years later, it’s the name the duo are releasing their debut album, called No Hard Feelings under.
A 12-track release that runs the gamut of pulsating and dark electronica, trans-global R&B hooks, and the sort of 1990s soul music that deserves to be blasted from a moon-lit convertible as it streams down an open freeway with the windows down, the group’s debut album is the product of several years worth of evolution. So where did it all start?
For the group’s vocalist and the elder of the two, it started out as a choirboy in church. “I went to a boys chorus school where I learned how to sing classical music,” explains Ahmad Larnes, recalling his childhood in New Jersey. “For a while I wanted to be a doctor, but that didn’t work out. Making music was always my calling.”
Ahmad navigated the toils of young adulthood as a singer in several bands, where he primarily sang R&B tracks. During the day he worked on fashion shoots in New York, by night he recorded his tracks. “I kind of had this dual life, where I would work this day job and record at night,” he says. “But I wanted to concentrate 100% on music.” So one day he had enough, packed everything in and, allured by the city’s lifestyle and artistic scene, moved to Berlin.
At the time, Sebastian Kreis had just moved to Berlin from a small village in Germany where the only thing “everyone cared about was football and what was on television.” Seemingly both artists were on the lookout for a musical companion, as Sebastian was one of the only non-crazy people to reply to Ahmad’s Craigslist bulletin, where he asked if anyone was up for making music.
On paper, the two couldn’t be more different. While Ahmad grew up working within fashion and enjoys Berlin’s nightlife, Sebastian is not really into clubbing and used to play in a rock band, having been inspired by the Rolling Stones, Beatles and Led Zeppelin records his dad would play to him as a child. But that environment quickly got boring, he says. So what brought the two together? A shared love for popular R&B; or as Sebastian says “The 2006/2007 time with all the Timbaland records.”
From here, the pair released an EP with the iconic French label Kitsune in 2013. A self-titled EP followed up in 2015. But No Hard Feelings is their first full-length release. “We kind of have this love-hate relationship. It’s always constantly changing. So I thought ‘No Hard Feelings’ summed it up,” says Sebastian. “It’s also a great title for an album because it has an old-school feeling to it,” adds Ahmad.
The aim of the album is to dominate the airwaves with a new pan-European sound that differs from anything their peers are currently doing.
“You hear these songs being sung in falsetto and you’re like what the fuck are they singing about? They have these forgettable melodies and there’s no idea what they’re singing about,” explains Ahmad, offering up his views on the current ‘cool’ future-RnB sound and the duo’s reasoning for creating No Hard Feelings. “We like pop songs and we wanted to jump out of that. When I talk to people about our album, they’re a bit like ‘oh wow. It’s really pop.’”
Sebastian continues, “I really like the music scene in Berlin, but people are not really into writing songs. So I guess we kind of fill that song-gap in Berlin.”
As a final aside, Ahmad says, “We wanted to write these songs that were going to stick in people’s heads. I didn’t want to write songs that would exist in these small club environments.”
That hook-worthy, progressive pop sound is something they’ve achieved. “Mirror” is sketched with hints of Frank Ocean. “Take What You Want” – which features a rap from Shumee – could have been imported directly from Timbaland’s golden-era catalogue. “Lost In Time” is pure escapism into a night free from inhibition.
With No Hard Feelings, Schwarz Dont Crack’s mission is clear: to shift the Berlin sound into something that’s worthy of the world stage.