After announcing a collaboration to the world at the end of October, the metal debut of TV icon David Hasselhoff with two-man metal project CUESTACK, “Through the Night,” is available today.
Check out the Baywatch and Knight Rider star’s very first metal performance here in the official music video for “Through the Night” below! “Through the Night” is also available digitally on Spotify, Amazon Music, iTunes Music and Apple Music.
Fans of this unique collaboration can also get the extended “Through the Night” Box Set, a Digipak CD featuring a retro synthwave remix by Beartooth singer and mastermind Caleb Shomo, as well as an unplugged version and two additional CUESTACK songs. The Box Set also contains a unique poster, gym bag, autograph card and baseball cap. “Through the Night” is available for physical purchase at the official CUESTACK webshop at http://cuestack.com/shop.
The collaboration between the Austrian duo and the TV idol started in 2018 and what seemed like an impossible idea slowly turned into a reality. The ultimate goal was to create a metal project with the most-watched man on TV, showing the world his heavy side. Hasselhoff recorded the track with CUESTACK in 2019 in Vienna, where they also shot this epic music video together. CUESTACKconjured up a dystopian Sci-Fi world in the music video for “Through the Night,” continuing the cinematic style that was established with this year’s first single “Transhuman Generation.”
Watch the video at https://youtu.be/8RmG6ojUh_M. (See the full background story on the collaboration below.)
About CUESTACK:
When the worlds of eccentric lighting / VFX designer Martin Kames and shred guitar content creator Bernth Brodträger collide, explosive music and art manifest in the form of CUESTACK. An unmistakable blend of metal and electronic music with well established sonic trademarks is the result, paired with an industrial, dystopian corporate identity that is ever-present in the band’s cinematic music videos and artworks.
The first full-length CUESTACK album, Diagnosis:Human, will be released in 2021.
The full CUESTACK/David Hasselhoff collaboration background story:
“Through the Night” is a project that came to fruition after David Hasselhoff openly expressed his interest in heavy music and big appreciation for his fanbase within that genre. His legendary performance at the Austrian Nova Rock festival showed the promise of something very special happening when these two worlds would finally collide.
As life-long Hasselhoff fans, CUESTACK (Martin Kames, Bernth Brodträger) developed the vision for this unique project in 2018. After months of planning, meetings, songwriting and sketching out different ideas, they invited Hasselhoff to join them for a music and video recording session in Vienna.
After CUESTACK’s Martin Kames contacted and briefed Hasselhoff, they worked tirelessly to create an efficient schedule to pull all of this off on just one day. Meanwhile, CUESTACK’s Bernth Brodträger got to work on different demos and ideas for the song itself. “Through the Night” was an idea written on the very first day of gathering material for the project. It already resembled the final result quite a bit but in regular CUESTACK fashion, many additional songs were created, exploring different artistic possibilities. Kames and Brodträger eventually settled on the very first idea and demo and showed it to Hasselhoff.
Hasselhoff liked the song right away but wasn’t fond of the first set of lyrics. The song originally told the story of a lone wanderer in a dystopian future scenario, with intentions of capturing the entire journey in the music video, turning it into an epic short film. Without the images and story of the video in mind, the lyrics were too abstract for Hasselhoff ‘s taste. So Brodträger started from scratch to create the final lyrics, keeping only the original chorus. ‘Through The Night” is now about pushing through dark times with hope and courage, fighting your way towards the light at the ending of the tunnel. This resonated with Hasselhoff immediately and still made it possible to work themes of darkness and struggle into the lyrics, while keeping the focus on a positive message.
Both the song and music video were recorded in April 2019 and Hasselhoff went back to California as CUESTACK and their team put together this vision during the following months. Due to the very limited timeframe of the music video shooting, CUESTACK turned the multiple basic sets into impressive, surreal and dystopian digital worlds afterwards. Brodträger ‘s background and previous experience as a graphic designer came in very handy for creating the digital sets, while Kames handled the extensive cutting process, editing and post-production of the final music video. With this quickly evolving workflow, they could turn those basic two-dimensional sets into vivid images and futuristic landscapes that further express the atmosphere and sound of the song.
