Richard Z. Kruspe

Richard Z. Kruspe — born in Wittenberge, East Germany, on 24 June 1967 — is Rammstein's founding guitarist and the main author of the band's music. It was he who assembled the group in 1994, four years after German reunification, and who set the compositional method: simple, almost primary riffs, built on few notes and stubborn repetition. It is the opposite of virtuosity. Rammstein's force comes not from the complexity of the guitar lines but from the weight with which they are repeated and the room they leave for the voice and the keyboards to occupy. That design is deliberate and gave a style its name — Neue Deutsche Härte, the "new German hardness" — combining industrial metal, electronic dance music and singing in German. The decision never to sing in English was, in 1995, an obvious commercial obstacle; the band turned it into an identity and became the biggest non-English-language rock group in the world. Alongside Rammstein, Kruspe keeps Emigrate, a project of his own in which he sings and writes in English — exactly what his main band refuses to do.