Four decades after they released their debut, A Secret Wish, original Propaganda vocalists Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag have teamed up with that album’s producer, Stephen Lipson, to form xPropaganda. The two singers revisit the past and explore their latest chapter with current release The Heart Is Strange.

Words: Rob Hughes

The heart may be strange, but this partnership feels perfectly natural.

Images: Jimmy King

In March 2018, Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag reunited at The Garage in Islington, where they performed Propaganda’s 1985 classic, A Secret Wish, in its entirety. It was a move as welcome as it was unexpected. The response, across both sell-out nights, was overwhelming. And inspiring. So much so, in fact, that Brücken and Freytag decided to throw themselves into a new project.

Together with producer Stephen Lipson, who oversaw A Secret Wish back in the day, they’ve now reconvened as xPropaganda, a full 35 years since the band’s initial split. “When Susanne and I finally managed to pull off the gig in 2018, it was just so tremendously enjoyable,” explains Brücken. “But we quickly realised that we needed more music for our live shows. To begin with, we were thinking of doing only four songs or so, then while we were writing we just said, ‘Why don’t we do a full album?’”

The upshot is the exceptional The Heart Is Strange, a long-overdue companion to A Secret Wish (1990’s 1234 was a Propaganda album in name only). “It really grew out of the whole writing and studio time,” says Freytag, seated beside Brücken on a video call with Prog. “We’d always tried to work on new music throughout the years, but somehow it just never happened.”