Berlin band Luft release their second single, The Punch and Judy Man

Luft have released The Punch and Judy Man, the second single from the Berlin five-piece, and it sets English seaside folklore against Krautrock rhythms and off-kilter guitars. The Line of Best Fit posted the track on August 19, 2026.

The band is fronted by Tom Dougall, who used to play in TOY. "Each song is a little story, stories about England and stories about being in Berlin," he told the site, describing the album he is sitting on as half of one and half of the other.

The title came from Luke Haines, who mentioned a film called The Punch and Judy Man that Dougall had never heard of and described it to him as the most depressing film ever made. A snippet of it turns up at the very end of the song.

What Dougall sings is a seaside resort with trouble brewing under it, and a trickster playing the fool behind your back.

Haines, of The Auteurs, recorded and mixed with the band. Dougall said their tastes line up closely enough to make that easy, that they worked without specific reference points, and that the brief between them was "let's make it heavy and weird". He said he hopes to work with him again.

Luft grew out of the end of TOY, which broke up in 2020. Dougall moved to Berlin with his girlfriend Annie, who plays synths and sings backing vocals in the band, and found the city set off a run of writing. It was the first time he had written on his own rather than with other people, he said, and a productive stretch. The rest of the band followed to Germany a couple of years later.

He puts some of the sound down to the place itself, saying there is something in how Berlin looks and feels that he cannot quite pin down but can hear in the music. Sam Davies, the band's guitarist, wrote the psychedelic guitar lines that run under the track.

The Punch and Judy Man is logged on the release calendar with the week's other indie tracks, among them gash's data master and Grumpy's The Whale.

Most of the album was written the way this song was, with Dougall demoing alone before the band came in, and Haines is involved across the whole of it. No release date has been set for it.