Girls Under Glass (GUG) is a musical group from Hamburg, Germany, founded in 1986 by Thomas Lücke, Hauke Harms, and Volker "Zaphor" Zacharias.

They have generally been classified as a darkwave act, but have ranged across the goth–industrial "dark music" spectrum, including into industro-metal, and their work has integrated elements of pop, techno, and trip hop.

Hauke Harms, Thomas Lücke, Torsten Hammann, and Roland Weers formed the gothic-wave band Calling Dead Red Roses in Hamburg in 1985, released the album 1985 (on LP and CD) on Dark Star Records, then split up before the year was out.

Girls Under Glass was founded in Hamburg the spring of 1986 by Thomas Lücke (vocals), Hauke Harms (electronics and keyboards), and Volker Zacharias AKA Zaphor (guitar).

Around this time, they also began recording their first proper album, Humus, which was produced by Christian Mevs of the band Slime, and featured a bassist credited as Dr.

Trauma expressed their "passion for cold electronic music of the 70s ... combined with very new, contemporary elements",[1] and has been compared to a cross between Tangerine Dream and Clock DVA.

[1] The impetus for splitting off a side project was Harms' shift of interest to "very spherical, cinematic music" lacking typical song structures, combined with a feeling that the band might just go all-electronic if they did not "clarify and process our electronic influences and roots even more", shunting too ethereal or experimental work into another outlet.

[4] Multiple producers, including Peter Spilles of Project Pitchfork, helped the Trauma side-project complete its second album, Construct, and an EP, Silent Mission, both in 1994 and again on the Machinery label (distributed by CBM in the US).

Crystals & Stones (1995), its "Die Zeit" single (1995), then Firewalker (1997) were all characterized by an increasing admixture of pop, techno, industrial metal, and even trip hop elements.

For the tour in support of Crystals & Stones, the group employed Robert Wilcocks again, and picked up drummer Tippi Agogo (a musician from Vancouver who had worked with The Legendary Pink Dots and Skinny Puppy).

[4] Former KMFDM drummer Rudi Naomi joined the live lineup for the tour,[3] with Deathline International (an American–German electro-industrial act often active in San Francisco) as the opening band.

Harms and Ermes formed an alternative side project the same year, Traum-B, which produced a single, self-titled Goa trance and psy-trance[4] album, on the B.E.A.C.H.

[3][4] As the album's name suggests, there was a re-balancing reason for the shift back, similar to that which had led to the side-project: a concern that their new-found enthusiasm for a particular style would drown out everything else, and end the diversity of their output, by having "opened a certain flow a little too far".

I think the album is very good and it holds some of my personal favorite Girls Under Glass songs, like "The Bitter End", "Burning Eyes", or "Sick of You", which are mostly typical Girls Under Glass songs, just a bit too trashily produced.Equilibrium was issued by Hall of Sermon records, and re-released in the United States by Van Richter Records in 2006, with three bonus tracks (two unlisted on the liner, and the third a Trauma cover of Kraftwerk's "Radioaktivitat").

Grenzwellen-News wrote in 2006 that Girls Under Glass was "a band which from the beginning was highly praised by critics, and not least by colleagues, but whose image and basic orientation often remained too diffuse and difficult to grasp due to the constant sharp turns.

One review of Minddiver called it "quintessence and departure at the same time", and was impressed with its emotional depth, noting the "return to the power of the driving, compressed, melancholy wave song ... that carried personality, warmth, love, anger, and pain".

Rock music was forged with electronic programming and a mixture of English and German lyrics to run through a spectrum of metal to electro to pop without losing sight of any type of fluency.

A chance meeting backstage between GUG and filmmaker/photographer Jeffrey Delannoy through their common friend Carsten Clatte (frontman of La Casa del Cid and guitarist for Wolfsheim and Goethes Erben) led to the film idea.

GUG also provided archival material for production (after putting out a request to fans for footage they shot),[1] and the release includes a retrospective of their work, interviews with band members, reactions from other artists like Spilles, Ronan Harris (VNV Nation), Rodney Orpheus (The Cassandra Complex), and departed co-founder Thomas Lücke, plus backstage footage, and other bonus materials, running to a total of over three hours.

We were never a scene band, so never had identity problems.Throughout the rest of the 2000s and into the 2010s, Girls Under Glass made sporadic live appearances at various festivals, often as a different trio of Zaphor, Ermes, and Baumgardt.

[10] This appears to have begun spontaneously at a live show on 7 May 2016 in the Markthalle in Hamburg, when original co-founder Tom Lücke, in the audience, was invited onto the stage – 26 years after the singer left the band – to sing a Humus through Flowers-era block of songs.

This re-formed crew released a vinyl-only remaster of their original demo, for old-time fans, and performed additional, planned shows in 2016 and 2017,[10] including at WGT 2016 and at NCN Festival 2017, with the line-up consisting of Volker Zaphor Zacharias, Ermes, Harms, and Lücke, plus the band's longtime companion Lars Baumgardt on electric guitar.

After playing a few festivals show with the original singer Tom Luecke, focussing on the early (80s) period the band is now back on the floor with brandnew material!