“Exactly The Amount Of Steps From My Bed To Your Door”is the name of the album with which Magnus Hesse alias Bayuk. It is – after the aforementioned “Rage Tapes” – his second record, but the first for Monchique/Greenland Records. And if it didn't sound so much like a cliché, you would have to say: It is, in a way, his second debut. Music with new stories, new images, new overtones and undertones. (It may well be that this is simply due to the principled attitude of this artist. That Bayuk is a singer, songwriter and musician who will only release debut albums for the rest of his life. We will see.)

“I used to jokingly call my music ‘pop in disguise’,”says Bayuk about the new album.“If you stay with this image, you could say: Now I’m taking off the disguise.” 

The basics in brief: Magnus Hesse is 29 and lives in Berlin. Originally from Tübingen, he taught himself guitar and piano as a teenager in the 2000s. He started writing songs and playing in bands. But it was only after his application to film school failed that he devoted himself entirely to music.

"When I started working on the new songs, the first question that came to mind was: What are the topics I want to write about? What do I want to say?", remembers Magnus. And it's not as obvious as many people might think. In the first Bayuk phase, Magnus and his creative partners often started from sounds and atmosphere painting, and were guided by spontaneity and a love of experimentation in the studio.

That the approach this time would be different, driven more by authorship, common threads and poetic commitment - that became clear little by little when he started writing the new songs in 2018. And whether by chance or not, it set another, very special development in motion. "Exactly The Amount Of Steps From My Bed To Your Door" became an album on which Magnus Hesse deals with his own youth in terms of style and content. Or, if you raise the perspective to a slightly more pathetic level: with big themes such as memory and reassessment, the tension between old and new selves - and the question of what it means for the future when you have eventually solved the historical puzzle that makes up your own personality.“I have made a lot of music in the last two and a half years, in different genres with different people”, says Magnus."But the pieces that became the new Bayuk album all have a common vibe that has a lot to do with my past. With the people and places of my youth and the college and indie rock that I heard there."  

And so "Exactly The Amount Of Steps From My Bed To Your Door" has become, not least of all, a declaration of love for the indie rock of the noughties. Bands like Bloc Party flash up in the chorus of "Different" or the darkly beautiful world of the Danger Mouse / Sparklehorse album "Dark Night Of The Soul". The massive warmth of the downtuned guitars, which are even reminiscent of Weezer in "Marty McFly", determines the basic mood of the album. However, Bayuk also dares to tackle less heavy, almost folk-pop melodies for the first time, which with a precise dose of tender world-weariness are sometimes reminiscent of Phoebe Bridgers or Conor Oberst.

In addition to producer Jonas Holle and various guest musicians, the songwriter and cellist Joel Siepmann, with whom Magnus had actually performed together during his school days in Tübingen, was involved in most of the new songs. Tobias Kuhn, head of the Monta project, busy music man and co-founder of the Monchique label, on which the album is now being released, has also been part of the extended Bayuk family for many years. "Different" is the first duet that Magnus and Tobias sing together.

Other highlights like "200 Miles" show how Magnus has developed into a writer and singer of great melodies that sound like hymns and threaten to fall apart the next moment. "200 Miles" is about a scene that could have come from a Charlie Kaufman film: a couple on a long car journey, where interpersonal rifts open up and unspoken questions arise that neither of them can avoid.

“Oslo” is the song that turns the end of a painful, final embrace into a song and also lets you musically feel the chill that comes with the freedom you have achieved.

"Exactly The Amount Of Steps From My Bed To Your Door" doesn't sound retro for a single second, but from the first to the last piece breathes the spirit that comes with memory in the present. A song cycle that deals with the many apocalypses that one experiences as a child at nightfall, that finally answers 20-year-old love letters, re-decides past coolness contests and arrives at a very peculiar form of present wisdom - a wisdom that one finds for a fleeting moment when one has looked deeply into the eyes of one's own, young self. Music in which one also seems to hear the voice of Holden Caulfield, the young hero from Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye". And in which Magnus Hesse himself sings:“And the years went by / But I’m still the same boy”.It is this old, young, new Bayuk that we want to hear, over and over again.