With their seventh studio album, ENCORE, Tokio Hotel turns heartbreak into momentum. Bill and Tom Kaulitz have rarely sounded this unguarded, and rarely been this aware of who is listening.
It’s the kind of night when you can’t fall asleep, so you go down memory lane. Back to August 2005, when the band released their debut album Schrei, featuring Durch den Monsun. The English version, Monsoon, followed internationally in 2007. In 2025, they celebrated twenty years of that song, a milestone that also pointed firmly forward. Now that look ahead has a name: ENCORE, out on 16 October, and its first single, Changes.
SLEEK has followed the band closely. Jumping back to September 2024, Bill Kaulitz fronted our print issue, with a cover shoot and an interview in which he revealed his biggest secret: to have no secrets.
That sentence is worth holding on to, because it describes the band’s second act. Obviously, Tokio Hotel began as a teenage band: bright guitars, choruses made to be screamed by teenagers in a packed hall, a singer who was already the main attraction. What followed was a slow shift in what the band was selling. With Humanoid, the sound grew cooler and more electronic, and Kings of Suburbia and Dream Machine moved further into darker synth-pop. But the bigger change happened off the record. With their current podcast Kaulitz Hills (2021) and their Netflix series Kaulitz & Kaulitz (June 2024), the brothers stopped being just a band with a private life and became a brand in which the private life is the product. The music now sits inside a story the audience already knows.
It is clear to everyone, that the twins are a perfect team together. Bill told us for that archive issue that his grandad always told Tom: “You need to keep an eye on the money; your mother and Bill can’t handle.” And Bill? “He is doing all the visuals, cover, website, stage design….” It is a revealing split: one brother runs the numbers, the other the image. When he was about to turn 35, now two years ago, Bill also told us how much he loves getting older.
“The beauty of getting older is that you learn and become more relaxed – in your career and your personal life. Disappointments and heartbreak become easier.” – Bill Kaulitz.
Listening to ENCORE while keeping that in mind, the album sounds like a recalibration, away from a comeback. In 2001, the Top 10 album from four years ago, had already moved the sweetness of the early years somewhere more grown-up. Even though the guitars return, they sound a little different: dreamier, wider, with echoing backing vocals and verses that stay low and tense for a long time. It is a smart choice, because it nods to the band’s origins without pretending that nothing has happened since, and it leaves room for the voice, which is where the band has always been strongest.
The first new song, Shout 2 the Universe, is exactly what the title promises: a shout, and a plain admission that he wants to fall in love. On first listen it sounds like a perfectly normal pop line, and that is both its strength and its limit. The lyric stays general enough for almost anyone to claim it. But for an audience that has watched the brothers’ lives on a podcast and a streaming service for years, a line like this is never only a line. That is the central tension of the record: the songs ask to be heard as universal, while the context asks to be heard as biography. The band knows this, and ENCORE does not try to hide it.
Without You is a breakup song about letting go and trusting the universe. It lives from emotional contrast: the need for quiet and fresh air on one side, the urge to escape, drown out the pain and forget on the other. Beneath it all lies the lingering doubt that often follows heartbreak: whether what once felt so real was ever truly shared. You can hear that contrast in the melody, too. The verses stay soft over a steady drum beat, and when the chorus finally breaks through, it hits twice as hard. It is the most carefully built song of the ones released so far.
The theme carries into how the band talks about the process. Bill’s mantra is to put everything out there, and that is as much a media strategy as a songwriting one, as the latest season of Kaulitz & Kaulitz on Netflix (July 2026) shows, where the brothers argue because Tom is afraid his brother will get hurt again. Whether that openness is courage or calculation is hard to say, and probably both. It does mean that the vulnerability on the album arrives pre-packaged: the audience has already seen the before, so the after lands as a sequel.
“You have to go all-in; otherwise , it's just a promo video for yourself. Pain and disappointment are part of it, and I think it's important to show that.” – Bill Kaulitz
Then there is Dye My Hair. It may sound like just a line in a song, but those who know the band’s public history will recall that Bill changed his hair almost weekly. As he told us in 2024: “I have never thought about where my style should go.” A new chapter of life, a new bit of inspiration, and suddenly the old hair is boring. Changing it is the quickest way of saying: I am somebody a little different now. It fits an album that also has Changes in its tracklist. It also shows how closely image and music are woven together in this band. The hair, the visuals and the songs are one project, and the project is Bill. But the band is more than its styling. The four of them went through a lot together, he told us.
“The four of us were like in a cocoon. Going through that with your best friends, your family, and Tom, it really brought us closer. Of course, we had moments of fear, panic, depression, and exhaustion. But we were always able to pull ourselves out of it because our bond with each other provided a strong foundation.” – Bill Kaulitz
That foundation explains why the band has lasted. Despite the fame, the millions of fans and the haters, the core has stayed the same, and the loyalty of the audience is part of the business: Tokio Hotel have sold more than 10 million records worldwide and received over 70 platinum and 120 gold awards, as well as more than 110 national and international prizes. The question ENCORE leaves open is what happens next. A band that has made its private life public has little left to reveal, so the next step has to come from the music. On this album, the guitars, the restraint in the verses and the sharper arrangements suggest that it can. Homesick is the song I keep returning to. It feels almost like the end of an era, but also the start of something new, from a band that knows itself far better now. Whether the audience is ready to hear Tokio Hotel as a band first and a story second is the real test of this record.
ENCORE is released on 16 October. The Arena Tour kicks off at the end of October and is almost sold out, with the Summer Arena Tour to follow in 2027. Berlin gets the first look: a pop-up store at Prince Charles from 18 to 20 October, and the album release show at the Velodrom on 25 October.
Quotes from a written interview in 2024 by Tina Totic.