Diary of Dreams

History

Adrian Hates, who trained classically on guitar and piano, first played in Garden of Delight before launching Diary of Dreams in the late 1980s. The project’s name came from an early classical guitar piece he wrote called "Tagebuch der Träume." The debut album, Cholymelan, came out in 1994 on the Dion Fortune label. Buoyed by that release, Hates founded his own label, Accession Records, and put out a string of albums that steadily grew a dedicated following. The second album, End of Flowers, arrived in 1996 and built on the darkwave style of the first.

Bird Without Wings followed in 1997, and the more experimental Psychoma? appeared in 1998. A compilation called Moments of Bloom came in 1999, featuring two reworked tracks from each of the first four albums. The next two albums, One of 18 Angels and Freak Perfume, along with the companion EP PaniK Manifesto, leaned more heavily on electronic rhythms, which boosted club play and broadened the band’s audience.

In 2004, Nigredo—a concept album built around a mythology the band created themselves—marked a return to the sparser, more subtle ideas of earlier work, though it still included bursts of the dance-oriented sound from the previous records. Material from the Nigredo tour appeared on the live CD Alive and the companion DVD Nine In Numbers. Alive reached number two on the German Alternative Charts and placed thirteenth on the DAC Top 50 Albums of 2005. The EP Menschfeind was released in 2005.

The next full album, Nekrolog 43, came out in 2007 and offered a wider range of moods and concepts than earlier releases. The ninth album, titled (if), was released on March 13, 2009. On March 26, 2010, Hates put out A Collection Of..., a best-of compilation.

The single "Echo in Me," from the upcoming album Ego:X, came out on November 12, 2010. Ego:X arrived in Europe on August 26, 2011, in four different versions, with a US release on September 11, 2011. The studio album Elegies in Darkness followed on March 14, 2014. Hates has said his lyrics and artwork are influenced by German expressionism from 1909 to 1935 and by the idea of the "beauty of ugliness." In 2019, Diary of Dreams announced a short, rare US tour called Hell in Eden, with dates in May of that year.