There’s a pink-finned, double-horned mermaid in the lift. To most people, that might seem a bit strange, but not to Electric Callboy. In the video for the Germans’ single Elevator Operator, vocalists Kevin Ratajczak and Nico Sallach, both dressed in wigs and the kind of trainers your dad puts on to clean the garage, take a ride up and down a magic lift shaft, with surprises on every floor (kittens! A fire! A nightclub that looks like something out of Blade minus the blood and vampires!).
The warp-speed journey is commandeered by a mythical, moustached man dressed in a white fur coat and silver skin-tight trousers. Packed with WTF?! moments, not least ambient elevator music infiltrating a breakdown, the song is everything we’ve come to expect from the most fun band to hit the metal scene in years.
The video concept, Nico and Kevin tell us, was inspired by a real person, the genuine elevator operator at the House Of Blues in Chicago, where the band once played a gig.
“I was just asking, ‘Hey, what’s your job?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m the elevator operator,’ recalls Nico. “And the funny thing was that he was playing techno music, not typical elevator music. I stepped out of the elevator with Kevin, we took a look at each other, and I could see in his eyes he had the same idea… ‘That should be a song!’”
Wonderfully weird and wacky music videos have become Electric Callboy’s calling card, and it’s a strategy that’s worked: Elevator Operator clocked up more than one million views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Previous clips have seen them perform choreography in satin shirts to reworked 00s trance, pump weights in 80s spandex, and mosh in space with Elvis-style quiffs. As funny as they are, it’s led to some critics pigeonholing the band as a novelty.
“There is a big difference between being funny and being ridiculous,” insists Nico.
“It has been a burden to be in a funny band and therefore not be taken seriously as a musician,” agrees Kevin, referencing their trademark metalcore-meets-EDM. “I have struggled with that during my many years of being in Electric Callboy, and I think I speak for every member in the band, but at some point, it changed. People finally saw that even if it’s funny music, it’s well made, that we invested time and passion in it.”
And these days, the band can afford to let their imaginations run wild. “We always had ideas, but the question was, ‘How pricey is the video shoot?’” says Kevin. “Like, ‘We need fire… I have a lighter and maybe you can make it bigger?’ Now it’s, ‘Give me all your pyro!’”
The budget isn’t the only thing that’s blown up. Last year, Electric Callboy reached 10 million listeners on Spotify. They’ve founded their own event, Escalation Fest, in Oberhausen, Germany. Meanwhile, fans and industry insiders have talked about them as future Download Festival headliners, in the same breath as Bad Omens and Spiritbox.
Ever since Nico joined as co-vocalist in 2020, replacing previous singer Sebastian ‘Sushi’ Biesler, and they released viral single Hypa Hypa – sparking a killer run of genre-bending bangers, and 2022 album Tekkno – Electric Callboy have been caught in a whirlwind that’s seen them become one of the most beloved bands in modern metal.
“I missed the moment when it happened, actually,” muses Kevin. “It’s like when you’re not satisfied with your body, you go to the gym, and you lift weights. You get fitter and fitter, and there’s one moment that you get out of the shower standing in front of the mirror and you say, ‘Damn, I’m jacked!’”
They can, however, pinpoint when they realised something Really Big was starting to happen. For Nico, it was the band’s set in front of a gigantic crowd at Nova Rock Festival 2022.
“It was so overwhelming,” he recalls. Like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. OK cool, calm down, everything’s fine, man.’”
For Kevin, it was March 2023, as the band prepared to play the Lotto Arena in Merksem, Belgium. “It was where we hung our LED walls and the whole production was in place for the very first time,” he says. “There were nearly a hundred people, busy driving forklifts. I remembered all the times I’d carried my own keyboards onstage, and I’m like, ‘This is all happening because we are making music tonight.’”
The band are still learning to navigate that new reality. These days, they get recognised more frequently in public. It’s something that Kevin, one of the most down-to-earth dudes you could wish to meet, could do without.
“When I meet my friends, for example I go to the gymnastics with my kids, there are other dads and it happens that they know my band,” he explains. “All of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Wow, you’re here!’ I don’t want it, because it takes away that natural conversation with people. I want to blend in, you know?”
Anyone who has been to an Electric Callboy gig will vouch that they’re one of the best live bands out there. Their half mosh/half raves are a riot of colour, fireworks and costume changes that resemble a hardcore, two-hour workout every night – this is something that’s not lost on Kevin, who turns 40 this year.
“When I was 29, the second I turned 30, I got the feeling my is body was aching more,” he jokes. “I need a little bit more of going to the gym right now, but I honestly feel great onstage.”
Still, a lot less partying goes on these days. Today, Kevin and Nico are taking time out from family duties to dial into our interview from their respective homes in Germany. Both are married, and Kevin has two kids, while Nico has his second on the way.
“The older as we get, the more boring it gets,” Kevin laughs. “Ten years ago, I could have told you about, like, naked hangouts in the bus, but now it’s like, ‘Yeah, there was this one time I rolled over on my sofa in the green room, from left to right… crazy story.”
Still, the creativity and pure, unadulterated fun that comes with being in a band like Electric Callboy certainly has its benefits.
“When I look at people at my age that I went to school with, or that live in my neighbourhood, they look so fucking old,” says Nico. “I think the band keeps us young.”
All of this could have easily gone a different way. Back in 2020, before Nico joined, the band – then known under their original name, Eskimo Callboy – came close to calling it quits. After forming in the small German town of Castrop-Rauxel in 2010, they released five albums of fairly bog-standard, juvenile metalcore with previous singer Sushi, none of which made much of a dent on the scene.
Within the band, all was not well. By the time they went into the studio to record 2019’s Rehab, their final album with Sushi, relationships within the band had disintegrated to breaking point.
“Although we worked on one project, it was always a compromise,” remembers Kevin, who describes that period as “the worst time of my musical career”. “It was like when in a relationship two people go separate ways. It’s not a question about who is right or wrong, it’s just it didn’t work. It was toxic in the end.”
“I’ve almost forgotten the songs on Rehab,” he says. “Every single day I woke up to write that album, I’d have rather stayed at home. I didn’t even want to make music anymore. We did our music, we did our vocals, we shot some videos, but it was heartless, and it had no soul.”
When Sushi left in 2020, it was like a switch had been flipped. Almost immediately, the band found themselves written off by their label and industry colleagues.
“Everyone around us was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you have a contract, but could you please tell us first what you’re going to do, and could you show us some songs…”
Things weren’t gloomy for long, though. In 2020, Nico joined the band, auditioning with a video of himself singing EC song Prism (you can watch it on YouTube). A few months later, having recognised that their original name was problematic – a slur against the Inuit community – the band changed it to Electric Callboy and never looked back.
Now, the band view Nico’s arrival and the single Hypa Hypa as the true beginning of the band. Relationships are tight, based on honesty, respect and friendship.
“Each of us has the possibility to give his output and everybody gives it a chance,” smiles Nico. “Over the past five years, no single day has ever felt like work.”
Despite how big things have become, Electric Callboy are very much an in-house operation. The band gather around the huge table in their studio to brainstorm every move they make, with their videos handled through guitarist Pascal Schillo’s own production company, Schillobros.
It’s the reason everything they do feels authentic and packed with personality. That was never more obvious than with Ratatata, the band’s ludicrously fun 2024 collab with Japanese superstars Babymetal, which Metal Hammer readers voted song of the year.
With its delicious earworm melodies, buzzing EDM and juddering guitars, it was a hefty dose of pure joy, a perfect smash of West-meets-East bedlam that’s been played more than 35 million times on YouTube and 63 million times on Spotify. The video sees Nico and Kevin barging through walls like a two-men wrecking machine wearing disco ball helmets… because why not? While Su-Metal, Moametal and Momometal drink cocktails in a Tokyo karaoke room, like a typical girls’ night out. It’s easily the most relaxed we’ve seen Babymetal, a rare moment they seemed to let their guards down and their personalities shine through.
“We wondered, ‘Are we going to see them between the shots?’” says Kevin, who didn’t know what to expect when the two bands met up to make the video. “But it was a great time whenever we saw each other. We talked, they’re just good girls.”
“They were into it the second we asked them,” recalls Nico of the shoot’s general goofiness. “We didn’t have to play any cards to make them do it.”
The track itself was written online, sharing audio files and ideas over a long back-and-forth. “Normally when we finish a song, we have, like, six or seven versions,” explains Kevin. “In the end with Ratatata it was version 21, 22 or something.”
Both bands brought something to the table. “There were things, for example Babymetal’s ‘Fu! Fu!’s, that we didn’t like at all,” says Nico. “But they told us it is something they use in the karaoke scene, and that’s so typically Japanese that we said, ‘OK, it would be a bad decision not to try it.’ We met straight in the middle. Now, I can’t think of the song without the ‘Fu! Fu!’s anymore.”
Elevator Operator is the first single from Electric Callboy’s upcoming, unnamed seventh album. It’s one of two songs recorded so far, which Nico states “could not be more different”. For the rest of the album, though, it looks like there’ll be a wait.
A relentless touring schedule over the last two and half years means there’s been a delay in recording it, and although Kevin and Nico are staying tight-lipped, they can give us an idea of what to expect…
“We don’t want to do a second Tekkno, but we want to keep up the vibe,” says Kevin. “We have some songs that are pretty similar to some Tekkno songs. On the other side, there are things we tried out in small parts on Tekkno, that we liked that much, we’re now trying to do whole songs out of them.”
“One of the coolest things about being a member of Electric Callboy is the freedom in writing new music,” adds Nico. “There are no boundaries. We can do whatever we want. Even if we drop a Schlager song, which we did [with 2022’s Hurrikan], people are not pointing their fingers at us and telling us that we are not Electric Callboy anymore. This is actually what the people expect – the unexpected.”
Meanwhile, 2025 looks to be their biggest year yet. In May, they will play their first UK festival headline slot, at Slam Dunk, and in November they will play their biggest UK gig yet, at London’s iconic Alexandra Palace, as part of a European tour that includes several 15,000- to 17,000- capacity arenas in Germany.
We note that Ally Pally tends to be the final stop before bands make the leap to arenas. It’s a far cry from the early days of the band, where they lost more money touring here than they made, but it’s all part of their new reality. Right now, it seems nothing can stop their onward march. Whatever fate throws at them, Electric Callboy are ready.
“It’s crazy that we’ve reached that kind of level, and I just can’t imagine there is another step,” says Nico. “I’m happy with what I have right now. Sure, we have to think big, but there’s nothing bigger I can imagine than an arena. I can’t imagine playing a stadium, or anything like that. I want to dream of it, and if it happens, I’ll pinch myself.”
Electric Callboy headline Slam Dunk in the UK next month. They play London's Alexandra Palace on November 11. Order your exclusive Electric Callboy shirt & magazine bundle online now.
