That’s how it was at PLAGE NOIRE 2025!

November 14 to 15, 2025 at Weissenhäuser Strand

Winter sea with black as home

Plage Noire is not a summer festival camouflaged in autumn colors – it was conceived from the beginning as a festival with winter romance and cold air that sounds warm. For years, this gathering at Weissenhäuser Strand has been a permanent fixture on the map of the black scene: vacation resort, sea air, cold paths between the locations – and inside, warmth, fog, cones of light. You check in like you’re on vacation and come out like after an intense night that you can’t explain without a smile on your face. And so we spent two days that didn’t make the Baltic Sea any warmer – but the people did. The audience: scene-setting, style-conscious, friendly, focused. Not a party crowd, but rather a collective of connoisseurs. Between the stages, merch stands and drinks bars: Hugs, stormy reunions – and so many reasons why we call this “home”.

Day 1 – When the Baltic Sea wears black

Asbury Heights opened in the large festival tent with elegant, bittersweet synth-pop that was like neon on a wet street – cool in sound, warm in the stomach. You could tell immediately that this wasn’t about volume, but about atmosphere. Later, Das Ich came on and tore up the room with their unmistakable mixture of theater, abyss and irony. Words like sounds, gestures like shadows – and an audience that knew every nuance.

Gothminister followed like a dark comic that suddenly came to life: Masks, drama, a powerful drive. The beat pounded as if it wanted to beat the vacation park smile out of the walls – and that’s exactly why you loved it. Then [:SITD:]: precise, powerful, ice-cold in the best sense of the word. Bass lines like steel beams, sequences like machine breath – and heads in front of the stage nodding to the beat as if it were a common language. Letzte Instanz followed, picking up the audience with raw warmth: Folk rock, rock’n’roll heart, that honest directness that also works in the black cosmos. Suddenly people who had just been marching to EBM were singing along – and it felt completely right.

The Friday headliners in their winter coats

Deine Lakaien made time slow down. Ernst Horn built spaces out of sound, Alexander Veljanov filled them with his unique voice. Songs floated between light and shadow like old letters: elegant, melancholic, unbreakable. And this is exactly where Plage Noire showed why this festival exists – because it’s not just about dancing, but also about feeling.

VNV Nation set the antithesis at the end: energy, hope, collective heartbeat. Ronan Harris hit that rare sweet spot between pathos and sincerity without becoming cheesy – a kind of lifting up to the beat. The room jumped, cheered, sang as if they were repairing something together that had long since broken again outside. And when the set ended, this feeling remained: we are not alone with what moves us.

Day 2 – Come for the darkness

Saturday started with Eden Weint im Grab and their dark poetry that ran over the room like candle wax: morbid and beautiful – just the way it should be. Beasto Blanco followed with glam grime and rock attitude, conveying a feeling of club instead of coast. Glitter met dirt – and everyone still grinned in black.

Then Future Lied to Us: modern, driving, slightly futuristic, as if they had once put the night through a synthesizer. This was followed by Lacrimas Profundere, who poured melancholy into heavy guitars – heartache, but with bite. Neuroticfish got your legs moving without turning your head off: clear electronics, danceable, sharp. Frozen Plasma followed up later – anthemic, radiant in the darkness, as if the choruses were briefly parting the clouds.

Veljanov acted like a silent magnet: no exaggeration, just presence. His voice hovered above the heads, and suddenly that “Lakaien” feeling was back in the room – only more intimate. Suicide Commando then tore open everything that had just been elegant: aggression, pressure, that brute club force that you don’t find pretty, but need. The floor vibrated as if the coast had been turned into a bunker system.

Oomph! followed with force and grand gesture – rock/NDH energy that brought the room to a boil.

The Saturday headliners with a black pulse

Then Schandmaul: an unexpectedly warm campfire in winter, folk and melody, singing along in a raspy voice, smiling faces despite the black. Schandmaul showed how well stories can be told if they are not ironed out. Between dance, pathos and humor, there was always that hand on the heart that says: “We mean it.” Three or four songs – and you were in a world of characters, wanderlust and little escapes. And yes: even on Weissenhäuser Strand you could feel like you were in another time for a few minutes.

Then Nitzer Ebb – and suddenly everything was back to square one. No jewelry, no romantic escape, just rhythm, body, commanding tone. This band didn’t come across as nostalgia, but as a reminder of how hard and uncompromising EBM can be when it doesn’t smell of retro, but of now. The room became a single, collective push – and you realized: some music is not entertainment, it is a discipline.

Words as a stage

Between all the noise and light, there were spaces where people breathed differently. Christian von Aster read with that quirky charm that not only takes darkness seriously, but also gives it a twinkle in his eye. Markus Heitz brought force and narrative drive, as if he were shaking worlds out of his sleeve. Finally, Isa Theobald provided a quieter, more intense contrast – words that don’t scream, but remain.

Fabrics, cuts, attitude – fashion as a second language

On both festival days, the Plage Noire also became a catwalk landscape. The fashion walks ranged from wearable scene fashion to expressive haute-gothic couture. Mond Mädchen Couture played with drama and poetry, Re-Agenz showed clear lines and industrial coolness, while Latex Fashion Design confidently brought physicality and provocation to the fore. Darkdream Collection allowed dark romanticism to flow, and Yourshape combined form, individuality and scene aesthetics to create moving statements. Fashion was not presented here – it was lived.

The festival feeling was rounded off organically by long after-show parties, the traditional group photo of visitors on the so-called “black beach”, fire shows, the intensive body painting by Ira Ott and a multitude of traders where you could browse, discover and linger

Departure with sand in your shoes and songs in your head

Plage Noire 2025 was not a weekend that was “done”. It was a state: sea breeze outside, dark glow inside, scene everywhere. A festival that proves that darkness doesn’t have to be cold. That you can find yourself in November – between the sea, cones of light and that special feeling of being part of something. And when you rolled back towards home at the end, the beach remained behind you – but the echo, the feeling in your heart remained in the front of your chest.

Text & Photos: Thomas Friedel Fuhrmann