With over 15 million streams ("Washed Up") and appearances at festivals such as the Reeperbahn Festival or Eurosonic, there’s one thing that’s clear: Sharktank have become an integral part of the Austrian and German music scene. And since their debut "Get it Done" (released in June 2021), rumor has it that the international breakthrough will not be long in coming. With "Acting Funny" they are about to release their second album on March 24th, 2023 and show themselves to be extravagantly keen to experiment. Sharktank stays Sharktank - only more multifaceted.
The band knows how to skillfully weave familiar melodic vocals, synth sounds, rap, rock and pop tunes without the feeling of having a bad snack mixpack. Light as a feather, they prove what it means to swim against and at the same time with the current without getting stuck in one place; recall value, a nomination for the Amadeus Music Award 2022 (category Alternative) and a live session on the American broadcaster NPR included.
It all started when in 2020 Marco Kleebauer, who we have been following as a multi-instrumentalist and producer (Leyya, Bilderbuch) for some time now, and Mile Lechner, hip-hopper at heart, founded the Sharktank prototype. A phone call later, Katrin Paucz was also part of it. What began as a melodic garage band career for the Viennese quickly developed into a position as a guitarist for Bilderbuch, before she picked up the phone just at the right time.
The three of them perceive producing as an intuitive reaction to one another, everything flows very easily. "We almost always start from scratch in the studio, it's just a little bit of a back to the roots for me", Mile says, who started rapping during school breaks, collecting tons of not-yet released recordings, followed by a few years of making music 'just for fun ' and is a hip hopper at heart. Sharktank was his starting point and also the one for a new, musical field of tension that "opens a niche on the German-speaking music market that we didn't know existed before" (Diffus), to which, at this point, we’d like to add the word international: Sharktank swims upstream.
The song texts come and go almost as a game of ping-pong by Katrin and Mile, elements such as Marco's drum loops then mix in and vice versa. "It's give and take and something always happens". What few people know: Katrin and Mile didn't know each other personally for a long time, although the trio was already officially a band. Due to their full time schedules the work was mostly done in separate sessions and only at their first live performances did the two finally play side by side, physically. The step from "Get it Done" (released in June 2021) to "Acting Funny" (to be released in March 2023) is clearly noticeable: Not only personally, but above all as instrumentalists the three have grown together. "It's only logical that we wanted to outbranch", the band says.
The summer was accordingly special and there was massive applause and appreciation across the indie and tastemaker festivals. In April and May 2023, their first proper tour in the German-speaking area lies ahead of them and will bring an exclusive band life par excellence. It's a good thing that they're already musing about challenges and key moments in life: They’re well prepared to start off.
As fast as sound spreads under water their success doesn’t come as a surprise. Additionally to the nomination at the Amadeus Music Awards 2022 (category Alternative), the band is gaining an ever-increasing international audience. In the USA, the renowned broadcaster NPR recently recorded a hot Sharktank live session: "Vienna's Sharktank blends and bends genres to create its own unique sound" (NPR, August 2022). And let’s be honest, who could resist that?
