Till Lindemann.
The Christmas gift not only for Prague residents but also for all fans of spectacular industrial metal was the performance of East German frontman Till Lindemann at the O2 Arena on December 18, 2025. His announced show, Meine Welt, was preceded by information about provocative and borderline visual and textual content, especially with regard to the explicit presentation of sexual practices. This was confirmed relatively at the last minute by the fact that the concert was designated as inaccessible to young people under the age of 18.
Around 8 p.m., however, the whole program began quite innocently with reproduced yodeling, which introduced the American-Austrian opening act Aesthetic Perfection. The quartet (Daniel Graves, Joe Letz, Constance Day, and another guest guitarist and keyboardist) delivered a solid stage performance with surprisingly good sound. Day switched from a seven-string guitar to a five-string bass and occasionally jumped to the keyboard. The performance was a good promise of the main course. After a short introduction and the curtain falling, the machine-like rhythm of the first song by the star of the evening, Till Lindemann and his band, namely "Fat" (Skills in Pills, 2015), kicks in. The rear projection generally illustrates the content of the lyrics, so in this case we can watch the lascivious movements of a naked woman of advanced age who is visibly overweight, all in black and white with a filter that sharpens selected parts. On either side of the stage, two figures dressed in costumes of naked overweight women writhe around. The opening sequence sets the tone for the entire evening, which is full of short pornographic videos edited at a fast pace to the rhythm of thumping beats. The songs follow each other briskly, with "Altes Fleisch" (Zunge, 2023) having a rousing marching tempo, in which the entire ensemble marches along, with the exception of Danny Lohner (guitar). Women dominate the stage, and when a man—Joe Letz—sits behind the drum kit, he wears a bra and other accessories that stylize him as female. The entire show is conceived as a picturesque depiction of the masculine world in the mind of an aging and declining rebel. "Golden Shower" (Skills in Pills, 2015) is a song that caused half the audience at one of the big American festivals to leave and never return. However, the music works excellently thanks to its pulsating rhythm, and its quality outweighs the sexual practice depicted in detail in the video. Thematically different is "Sport Frei" (Zunge, 2023), which critically reflects on Till's sporting career as a swimmer. From the same album is the calmer, acoustically conceived "Tanzlehrerin" (Zunge, 2023). The following two tracks are from the album F & M, 2019. They are "Blut" and "Allesfresser." The first one relies on a calm march during which dancers, who occasionally reach for the keys, perform daring gymnastic creations on poles. Together, they throw cakes into the audience, which the technician brought on a large mobile counter. Meanwhile, the audience enjoys more obscenities from the menstrual register. Pornographic videos continue to roll out onto the audience, and Till Lindemann, with his narrative vocals more confident in the lower registers, offers more and more stories. The 62-year-old singer, who is visibly moving with increased caution, travels a third of the area under the stage in a protective plastic bubble, slowly approaching the end. The encore consists of "Knebel" (F & M, 2019) and "Ich Hasse Kinder" (Zunge, 2023), which describes the feelings of a passenger on a plane sitting next to a small child. The entire concert ends with the entire band lining up on a moving walkway at the top of the stage, and a sort of parade bids farewell to Prague. Danke Schoen is met with applause, and the event of the year comes to a close.
Those who are familiar with Till Lindemann's work and came for vulgarity, pornography, and obscenity could not have been disappointed. However, this bass-baritone's repertoire does not go beyond the shadow of Rammstein, and it is questionable whether the combination of industrial metal without added value with eccentric and at the same time straightforward references to intimate human activities in a natural to obscure form is a viable concept for a work of art.