The Berlin-based artist Jennifer Touch drops her new single “Gudrun”, teasing us ahead of her album release Midnight Proposals in February 2023. Named after her grandma, Gudrun, the eponymous track explores the journey generations before her took in search of freedom. Industrial and minimalist, “Gudrun” is the perfect prequel to the dark weave electronica of Midnight Proposals.

While writing Midnight Proposals, Touch sought inspiration from novels such as The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, in which narratives of the settler movement are prominent. Many of these stories share commonalities to those of her great grandparents’ and grandma’s. “The whole settler movement really touched me. I really felt like a cowboy whilst writing and recording these songs,” says Touch on Steinbeck’s book.

“My grandma Gudrun’s parents were given a piece of land after the second world war, and her father built the house she is still living in today at nearly 90. After a happy childhood her parents died young from diseases and she was all alone in this sanctuary, or, cage, controlled by society’s rules,” the singer shares. “I have this image of her as a young woman, escaping this tiny house in the dead of night, seeking a freedom she’d never felt before. Before she knew it, her window of opportunity was gone.”

Written in an explosion of creative energy, the highly anticipated album soon to come took just four months to write, vastly differing from her first album Behind the Wall, which took years to pen. Through intimate details of journeys past and present – and cold pop, acid romance, and electronica undulations – Touch delicately documents our desire, as humans, to search for our people and our safe places.

Step into Jennifer’s past below…