There’s this video on YouTube. Twenty-nine minutes, titled “Hamburger Aufstand (Live Session).” A camera hangs from the ceiling, angled down into a room: table, couch, armchair, a DJ with equipment in the corner. Disarstar raps for the camera, his people sit around him, laughing, talking, smoking. No stage setup, no spotlight – but no pose either. You could dismiss it as casual promo. Or you could look closer and realize that these twenty-nine minutes contain more about Gerrit Falius than many an interview.

Anyone who’s followed Disarstar over the past five years has watched a rapper shed his skin. Not once, but three times. From angry insider tip to political concept artist, from concept artist to a man straddling agitation and mainstream, from there to a father looking back at his life sober for the first time. “Deutscher Oktober” in March 2021, “Rolex für Alle” in October 2022, “Hamburger Aufstand” in August 2025. Three albums that together form a trilogy – even if they feel like three different life chapters of the same person.

The Big Bang: Deutscher Oktober

Spring 2021. Germany is deep in the pandemic, Gerrit Falius is deep in a recording studio in Ramshausen, Lower Saxony. Far from Hamburg, far from St. Pauli, far from the streets he raps about. Maybe that distance was exactly what he needed.

“Deutscher Oktober” is the album where Disarstar stops being the perennial insider tip. Twelve songs, dark trap beats, a concept album about class divides that doesn’t preach but documents. Plattentests.de headlined their review: “In der Ruhe liegt die Wut” – the fury lies in the calm. That nails it. Disarstar doesn’t shout. He lays things bare. He places side by side what coexists in this country and lets the gap speak for itself.

The album title is no accident. The “Deutscher Oktober” – German October – of 1923 was the KPD’s failed attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Hyperinflation, a surging far right, social immiseration – Disarstar draws the parallels without spelling them out. He trusts his audience to think along.

With features from Nura, Boz, Dazzit, and Eso.Es, he brings voices into the album that complement his own without blurring it. The closing track “Le Fin” reveals an emotional depth you wouldn’t have expected from the class-war rapper. Or maybe you would – if you’d been listening closely.

The Tightrope: Rolex für Alle

A year and a half later, October 2022. “Rolex für Alle” is Disarstar’s sixth album and his boldest. The title references Ludwig Erhard’s “Wohlstand für alle” – prosperity for all – but twists it into the absurthälmand: not against luxury, but luxury for everyone. The idea is provocative. And that’s exactly the point.

Disarstar pushes boundaries here. The trap aesthetic he’d resisted on “Deutscher Oktober,” he now deliberately embraces. Auto-Tune appears, “Supergirl” is the most accessible song the Marxist from St. Pauli has ever recorded. Reviews were mixed – laut.de was skeptical, others recognized in tracks like “Mode aus Paris” moments among his strongest.

“Rolex für Alle” sits between chairs, and that’s no accident. Between agitation and mainstream, between RAF aesthetics and pop appeal. Disarstar raps, in essence: You want to do business, and I want art – then makes an album that attempts both. Not every track pulls off the balancing act. But the attempt itself has earned respect.

In hindsight, “Rolex für Alle” is the album of a rapper chafing against his own standards, testing how far he can go without losing himself. The proof that he can comes three years later.

The Turning Point: What Happens Between Albums

What lies between “Rolex für Alle” and “Hamburger Aufstand” is more than an album hiatus. It’s a different life. In between, “Overdose” does appear (January 2024, with Jugglerz) – ten tracks, a collaboration, its own tour. But Disarstar doesn’t count it as part of the trilogy. “Overdose” is a tributary, not a chapter. The real story plays out elsewhere.

In March 2023, Gerrit Falius gets sober. Not gradually, but after a night that made it clear things couldn’t go on like this. For thirteen years he’d been working odd jobs alongside the music – delivery, construction – and drinking. St. Pauli as a way of life, but also as a trap. Now it’s over.

At the end of 2023, he starts a carpentry apprenticeship. Full-time. Forty hours a week in a workshop, music in the evenings and on weekends. He applies for the position like anyone else, comes from a family of tradespeople, initially keeps the rap career completely out of it. Two colleagues recognize him, the rest don’t. He’s sweeping the workshop floor when his management calls to say: 2,500 tickets sold in the first week for the Hamburg show. He hangs up and keeps sweeping.

In early 2024, he becomes a father – a son, after already being a stepfather for a few years. He briefly considers quitting music. Then instead collects 1,687 vocal recordings over two years and makes his most personal album.

The Uprising: Hamburger Aufstand

On August 29, 2025, “Hamburger Aufstand” is released. Fourteen songs, thirty-nine minutes, produced by Fayzen. The album is more stripped-back than its predecessors, the beats rawer, the tone more direct. After two records that kept trying to get bigger, “Hamburger Aufstand” sounds like a man who knows what he has to say – and what he doesn’t.

The title? Disarstar himself says in his Zündfunk interview that the main reason was pragmatic: “Hamburger Aufstand” followed nicely from “Deutscher Oktober.” “And it does sound pretty punchy, doesn’t it?” But of course 1923 resonates – the uprising of October 22 and 23, when KPD members stormed police stations in Barmbek. Already on the 2024 single “Regenjacke” (Overdose), he rapped: “Nein, ich meine nicht Hamburg wie Schmidt / Ich rede von Hamburg wie Thälmann” (“No, I don’t mean Hamburg like Schmidt / I’m talking about Hamburg like Thälmann”). The shift to the right, inflation, culture wars – he sees the parallels, but he doesn’t pin them to the wall like a thesis. They’re there. If you see them, you see them.

But “Hamburger Aufstand” is not a history album. It’s an album about a man who, at thirty-one, looks back at his life sober for the first time. “Familienchronik” processes his father’s alcoholism, the bankruptcy, the mother who stayed. “Tochter” – featuring Jassin – is about the chain of pain that runs through families: “Eine Mom ist auch nur eine Tochter und ein Dad ist auch nur ein Sohn” – a mom is just a daughter too, and a dad is just a son. No kitsch, because he’s honest enough to let his own uncertainty stand. And “Meine Söhne geb’ ich nicht” isn’t a track about his own childhood but about the conscription debate – a father who says: I’m not dying in a trench for interests that aren’t mine.

At the same time, Disarstar stays political. “Weiße mit Dreads” takes apart the cultural appropriation debate. “Großraumbüro” is class war in everyday format. “Wie viel” with Pöbel MC asks what resistance costs when you have a family to feed.

And then there are the contradictions. Plattentests.de noted: on “Monumente,” cars are set on fire; on “Tekken 6,” he’s cruising through the hood in a fat AMG. laut.de called the album “a Trojan horse with too much concept.” These are fair points. But they fall short when you look at the trilogy as a whole. Because precisely these contradictions – between system and scene, between principle and everyday life, between rage and tenderness – are the core of Disarstar’s work. He’s never pretended to have resolved them. Back in 2021, he told the taz: “Ich lebe permanent im Widerspruch” – I live in permanent contradiction.

The Trilogy as a Whole

Three albums, five years, one arc:

“Deutscher Oktober” is the awakening. The moment a rapper realizes his rage has a structure, a historical context, a name. Class war, not as a slogan but as a stocktake.

“Rolex für Alle” is the tightrope walk. The attempt to make the message bigger, broader, louder – and to find out where his own line runs. The bold second album of a trilogy that raises more questions than it answers.

“Hamburger Aufstand” is the synthesis. Not in the sense of a resolution, but in the sense of a person who has learned to live with his contradictions. Who hasn’t lost his rage but gained a tenderness that carries it rather than smothering it. A rapper who builds furniture in the morning, feeds his son at noon, and records 1,687 vocal takes in the evening. Because he can’t do otherwise.

The historical bracket – 1923, Deutscher Oktober, Hamburger Aufstand – was, according to Disarstar, half instinct, half coincidence. But it works. Not because he delivers a grand history lesson, but because the parallels arrive on their own: the shift to the right, inflation, culture wars. A May Day demonstration banner read a few years ago: “Heute wie vor 100 Jahren müssen wir den Aufstand wagen” – today, as a hundred years ago, we must dare the uprising. Disarstar didn’t turn that into a slogan. He turned it into an album. That’s more.

What’s Next

On April 30, Disarstar plays the Sporthalle Hamburg. Sold out. “Tanz in den Mai” – the biggest show of his career, in his city. Whoever sees him on that stage sees a different person from the one who recorded “Deutscher Oktober” in 2021. Sober, father, carpenter, still a Marxist. Still angry. Just clearer.