There is something almost perversely physical about "Sustained". Fabian Altstötter, the Berlin-based musician behind Jungstötter, builds his third album around the human breath, but refuses to turn that idea into some tasteful wellness metaphor. Breathing here is effort, interruption, desire, exhaustion: the sound of a body trying to remain present while everything around it seems determined to become noise.

Compared with the denser architecture of "Love Is" and "One Star", "Sustained" is remarkably reduced. Piano, strings, harmonica, electronics and abrasive fragments occupy a narrow but intensely expressive space, while Altstötter's voice moves through it with an unusual mixture of distance and immediacy. Sometimes it sounds barely attached to the body producing it; elsewhere it suddenly becomes almost startlingly melodic. The contrast gives the songs their peculiar tension. Nothing is quite comfortable, including the beautiful parts.

The opening "Overturn" establishes the album's language through repetition and disruption, its rhythmic pattern constantly threatening to lose its balance. "Sunk" then sinks into something more intimate, where piano and harmonica seem to rub against one another like two memories that cannot quite agree. On "That Noise", disturbance becomes almost a character in itself, while "Tell This Lover" and "Loud Fingers" reveal how effectively Altstötter can let conventional songcraft emerge from the wreckage.

The remarkable thing is that "Sustained" never mistakes fragility for gentleness. Its quiet moments can be more unsettling than its eruptions. Noise scratches at melodies; melodies retreat rather than resolve; instruments seem to breathe, hesitate and occasionally lose patience. Even "Again", featuring Ronja's spectral vocals, feels less like a duet than two separate bodies briefly discovering that they occupy the same atmosphere.

Altstötter's lyrics are similarly resistant to tidy interpretation. They move through love, exhaustion, desire, alienation and bodily sensation using images that feel half-remembered rather than explained. "Seaweed", "Consume Me" and "Elastic (Avenue)" are particularly good examples of this strange poetic elasticity: concrete images become psychological states without ever settling into symbolism with an instruction manual attached.

There is also something quietly political beneath the romanticism. Altstötter describes the album through the idea of a communal body, sustained by many people breathing alongside one another. That notion gives the record an emotional dimension beyond private melancholy. The “I” is repeatedly invaded by other voices, other hands, other breaths. Even solitude becomes relational.

This may explain why the album feels intimate without becoming confessional. "Sustained" is not interested in handing the listener a diary and asking for sympathy. It creates a fragile acoustic organism and lets us hear it struggling to remain alive. The music contracts, expands, scratches, pauses and starts again.

Human beings have spent centuries trying to make suffering sound profound. Altstötter takes the more difficult route: he makes it sound ordinary, physical and occasionally beautiful.

Then he lets it breathe.