If music is meant to comfort, Kollaps shatters that notion with a sledgehammer wrapped in steel wool and rebar. Einstürzende Neubauten’s debut is not just an album — it’s an act of sonic revolution, a declaration that sound doesn’t need melody to be musical, or harmony to be holy. Released in 1981, Kollaps is an apocalyptic birth cry from the ruins of post-war Berlin, fusing scrap metal, broken glass, power tools, and anguished vocals into a symphony of collapse. From the first strike of percussion that sounds more like a demolition site than a drum kit, you're not listening — you're immersed. Blixa Bargeld doesn’t sing so much as prophesy, his voice echoing like a mad preacher inside an abandoned factory. Tracks like “Tanz Debil” and the title track “Kollaps” reject structure, reject polish, reject anything resembling musical civility — and in doing so, find something deeply human beneath the wreckage. Each piece feels like a confrontation: with society, with conformity, with sound itself. This is not industrial music in the Nine Inch Nails sense — it’s industry itself turned into music. Yet for all its abrasion, there’s a strange beauty in Kollaps. It’s the beauty of entropy, of cities falling and being reborn, of the aesthetic potential of destruction. Neubauten takes the broken pieces of civilization and holds them up like artifacts, sacred and terrible. Essential listening for anyone interested in the outermost limits of what music can be. This is the soundtrack to a world unraveling — and maybe rebuilding, too. Then again, I'm giving this album 5 stars just to be contrary.