“What if the sweetest late-90s boyband love ballad suddenly turned into one of the heaviest songs we’ve ever written?” Electric Callboy subvert the soppy tropes with surprisingly heavy new single The Way You Are
A taste of their upcoming album Tanzneid, out next week
Electro-metal party-starters and current Metal Hammer cover stars Electric Callboy have released their new single The Way You Are.
Accompanied by a music video that parodies 90s and 00s boyband clips, available to watch below, the German six-piece take the balladry you’d expect from acts such as Westlife and The Backstreet Boys, then turn it on its head into an outright deathcore rager.
The song is the eighth single to be taken from their upcoming seventh album (second since changing their name from Eskimo Callboy in 2022) Tanzneid. The album comes out on August 7.
The band say of their new song: “The Way You Are started with a pretty simple idea: what if the sweetest late-90s boy band love ballad suddenly turned into one of the heaviest songs we’ve ever written? We loved playing with that contrast, both musically and visually. The result is probably one of the most unexpected songs we’ve ever released, and definitely one of our favourites on Tanzneid.”
The build-up to Tanzneid started in 2024, when Electric Callboy released the single Ratatata in collaboration with three-piece J-metal idols Babymetal. Fellow singles Elevator Operator, Revery, Tanzneid and a cover of Sum 41’s Still Waiting followed in 2025, with Hypercharged and Let The Good Times Roll (featuring The Offspring) coming out earlier this year.
The band are currently making their way across Europe as part of the Tanzneid world tour and will play an ‘Electric Bassboy’ DJ set at Wacken Open Air in Wacken, Germany on Friday (July 29). On August 7, at their own festival Escalation Fest, they’ll put on an album release party featuring another DJ set at Huxley’s Neue Welt in Berlin. They’ll headline the festival the following day.
The tour will continue with Japanese and Australian shows from August to September, then return for another European leg from January to March. See details and get tickets via the Electric Callboy website.
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Known for their high-energy, feel-good live shows, Electric Callboy were formed by vocalist/keyboardist Kevin Ratajczak in 2010. Second singer Nico Sallach joined the lineup in 2020. In the new Hammer, they talk about their history, including Sallach’s past throwing weekly house parties for all his friends.
“At its peak, we had 80 people in this tiny flat. People that we didn’t know were ringing the doorbell,” he says. “They treated our flat like shit. I wanted to go to bed, and there were drinks and liquids that I couldn’t identify all over my bed! Very good memories, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”
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Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. James Hetfield once told him to stop smiling.
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