Lambert

Born in 1983 in northern Germany, Paul Tony Lambert developed in Berlin a neo‑classical project as a pianist and composer under the name Lambert, notable for wearing a Sardinian leather mask adorned with wood that preserves his stage anonymity. Trained in jazz piano and having spent time as a drummer in garage rock bands, he refocused in the early 2010s on a language for acoustic piano that blends contemporary minimalism, romantic inheritance and a melodic sensibility close to film music. His first album, simply titled Lambert and released in 2014 on the Berlin label Staatsakt, consists of a series of short, hushed pieces, continued by Stay in the Dark in 2015—written and recorded at night—and then by Lost Tapes and Excess in 2016. Concurrently he rearranged songs by indie groups such as Rue Royale, Me and My Drummer and Bonaparte in this style and composed film scores, notably for Sonja Heiss’s comedy Hedi Schneider Is Stuck. From Sweet Apocalypse, released in 2017 on Mercury KX, his writing opened more to strings, percussion and brass, alongside a more pronounced studio approach. The collaboration with Brooklyn Dekker of Rue Royale resulted in the shared album We Share Phenomena in 2018, while True (2019) and False (2020) extended this more collective side—the latter featuring a different Mercury KX catalogue guest on each track—without abandoning a core of repetitive, melancholic and deliberately pared‑down piano playing.