GOTTHARD Trivia — 126 Entries
126 sourced facts about GOTTHARD.
Trivia
The official archive lists twenty-two shows in Japan, spread over eight visits — 1994, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2009, 2012 and 2014. The first is Club Citta on 29 July 1994 and the last is Tsutaya O-East on 2 October 2014.
Riding across the United States on a Harley-Davidson was something Steve Lee had wanted for years, and a crowded touring calendar had kept postponing it. The band’s own memorial page records that on 5 October 2010 the group had pulled onto the hard shoulder of Interstate 15, between Las Vegas and Mesquite, because of a mechanical problem and the rain that had just started. A truck came up behind them; its driver tried to swerve, but the trailer swept through five of the parked machines and one of them struck Lee. Resuscitation was carried on for twenty minutes and then stopped.
Ten days after release, on 31 March 2025, “Stereo Crush” went to number one on the Swiss album chart. The band posted the news on their own site, and their label Reigning Phoenix Music said it was proud to be part of the milestone.
On 20 July 2025 the band staged a revival of their 2005 Hallenstadion concert on the Piazza Grande in Locarno, using current LED technology and archive footage to put Steve Lee on stage with them one more time. It came in response to demand after their sold-out tribute show of 2023, and they chose to hold it in Ticino, the canton where Lee grew up.
“Liverpool”, from “Stereo Crush”, was remade as a duet released on 7 November 2025, sung by Nic Maeder with Marc Storace of Krokus. Chris von Rohr — the Krokus founder who had been Gotthard’s co-producer and co-writer for years — worked on it alongside Leo Leoni. Maeder said singing live on stage with Storace had always been an honour, and Storace said the two of them had a fine time singing together in the studio.
In 2026 the band wrote two songs for their local football club, FC Lugano: “Lugano My Town” and “Bianconeri Alè”. They were unveiled on 26 July at the club’s first league home game in the new AIL Arena and become a fixture of home matches from the 2026-27 season, the first setting up the crowd before kick-off around the bond between club, city and region, the second playing the teams onto the pitch.
The official site keeps a concert archive running from 1992 to 2025, one tab per year. It is nothing but plain tables of date, venue, city and country, and they add up to more than a thousand shows. Counted by country, Germany comes out on top with 347 dates, just ahead of Switzerland’s 336.
Lee’s death set off something the Swiss charts had never seen. For the first time in their history, thirteen albums by a single act appeared in the Top 100 at once — every album Gotthard had released to that point. The singles chart moved too: “Heaven” went to number one and “One Life One Soul” to number four, with nine Gotthard singles on the chart in all.
The band withdrew from everything until the turn of the year, and on 1 February 2011 said they intended to carry on. Leo Leoni explained that they had first had to face the pain and find somewhere to put it, and added that Gotthard was not a job to them but their life. Hena Habegger set out what they were looking for: not only a voice that could bring the songs back to life, but someone who fitted them as a person.
The successor was announced on 20 November 2011. He was Nic Maeder, born in Lausanne in 1971, who had also lived in Melbourne and grew up between Switzerland and “Down Under”. The band wrote that applications had poured in from all over the world in the months after they decided to continue, and that the choice of Maeder was unanimous. Hena Habegger said the search had taken a long time, but that when they met him it was clear to all of them.
On 8 October 2024 the band announced both a deal with Reigning Phoenix Music and a new album, “Stereo Crush”. Nic Maeder said that label head Sven Bogner had a motivated and capable team around him and that their enthusiasm for the music was what convinced them. Leo Leoni pointed to Markus Wosgien, a long-standing colleague who had already worked on many Gotthard records.
The first Japanese visit came in the summer of 1994: four shows between 29 July and 2 August. Only the opening night at Club Citta has a venue name in the archive; for the other three only the city survives. It was the year of their second album, “Dial Hard”.
The second Japanese trip ran from 28 to 30 July 1996 and took in the Club Quattro rooms in Nagoya and Osaka and the Liquid Room in Shinjuku — the year of their third album, “G.”.
The busiest Japanese run was 2012 — five shows between 6 and 11 September, opening with two nights at Shibuya-AX and going on through Osaka and Nagoya to Club Quattro in Hiroshima. Of the twenty-two Japanese dates in the archive, Hiroshima appears exactly once, and the visit came in the year of “Firebirth”, the first album with Nic Maeder.
Sixteen of the twenty-two Japanese dates carry a venue name in the archive, and of those sixteen exactly one is a festival: Loud Park on 18 October 2009. The other six rows have only a city, so what those nights were cannot be told from the official record.
The Japanese edition of “#13” appeared on Marquee with the catalogue number MICP-11540. Its release date was 18 March 2020, five days behind the worldwide date of 13 March.
The Japanese edition of “Need to Believe” came out on Marquee as an SHM-CD, catalogue number MICP-30017, on 2 September 2009 — two days ahead of the 4 September date elsewhere, one of the rare occasions on which listeners in Japan heard a Gotthard album first.
In Japan, “The Call” from “Domino Effect” was issued as a CD single in its own right — on Avalon, catalogue number MICP-40008, dated 5 September 2007. At a time when physical singles were disappearing, one was still being made for the Japanese market.
The Japanese edition of the Steve Lee memorial album, “Steve Lee: The Eyes Of A Tiger”, was released by Ward Records on 16 October 2020 with the catalogue number GQCS-90957, packaged with Japanese liner notes and translated lyrics.
The Japanese edition of “Stereo Crush” came out on Ward Records, catalogue number GQCS-91576, on 21 March 2025 — the same date as the rest of the world, where the Japanese “#13” had trailed the international release by five days.
The Japanese write-up of “Stereo Crush” opened with the fact that it was the fifth album since Nic Maeder joined, noting the five-year gap since the previous record and the credits — produced and mixed by Charlie Bauerfeind with Leo Leoni, mastered by Sascha Bühren. It closed by saying that with a European tour confirmed, hopes for Japanese dates were rising too.
The heading of the official memorial page is nothing but two dates — 5.8.1963 and 5.10.2010. The band close the statement by saying that what they lost was not only one of the finest rock voices anywhere but a friend whose sensitivity and unshowy character meant he treated everyone around him with respect.
The band page on the official site still keeps a place for Steve Lee. It carries his years, a passage from Ecclesiastes 3 about there being a time for everything, a line saying he is unforgettable and that his tracks are in their hearts, and a link to the memorial site. On a page otherwise made of short statements from the current line-up, that one entry stands still in a different time.
The Beatles cover “Drive My Car” started as rehearsal-room talk two years earlier. The band were running through possible covers when the title came up; they are all Beatles fans, so they jammed it on the spot and it felt right immediately. Having their own studio, they recorded it soon after — with no idea where or how it would be released. When work on “Stereo Crush” intensified the following year the song slotted straight in, and Freddy Scherer called it the last missing piece of the puzzle.
“Stereo Crush” arrived on 21 March 2025, almost exactly five years after “#13”, with twelve songs including the Beatles cover. “Thunder & Lightning”, out since January, had already gained traction on radio, and the record runs from the driving opener “AI And I” through the more balladic “Burning Bridges” and the backward-looking “Liverpool” to the harp-coloured “These Are The Days” — three decades of accumulated craft laid out one card at a time.
The band’s own release-day post lined up the trade-press verdicts: nine out of ten from Sweden Rock Magazine, 8.5 from Germany’s Rock Hard, nine from Britain’s My Global Mind and eight from Hardline, while Fireworks in the UK suggested this might be the Gotthard album that finally brings the doubters back.
The label’s announcement placed that number one in context: with “Stereo Crush” the band had topped the official Swiss album chart for the seventeenth time, and for the thirteenth time in a row. Maeder thanked the fans, writing that their support had taken the band back to the top of the charts once again.
Marc Lynn and Nic Maeder both took part in the sixth season of the Swiss television format “Sing meinen Song”, broadcast from 17 March 2025 every Monday at 8:15 p.m. on 3+, where “Drive My Car” from “Stereo Crush” was among the songs featured. Lynn admitted he had been sceptical about that kind of programme at the outset, and that the exchange with other musicians in such an intimate setting, and the musical surprises they sprang on each other, made him revise his opinion completely.
Y&T came along as special guests on the 2025 European tour. Leo Leoni called them the soundtrack of his youth and said sharing a stage with them was a dream come true, while Y&T’s Dave Meniketti replied with the band’s own line — that rock’n’roll never gets old as long as it stays real — and said the pairing fitted perfectly.
“Rock Monsters of Switzerland”, which puts the country’s two biggest rock bands on one bill, was revived in 2024 after the sold-out shows of 2017. Gotthard and Krokus were announced as double headliners for three concerts: Basel on 27 June, Bern on 19 December and Zürich on 20 December.
On 6 August 2025 the band played with an orchestra at the Magic Night in Zofingen. The announcement framed it as a test of what happens when their songs are given the weight of a classical orchestra — a sound meant to reach listeners on both sides.
One item in the band’s merchandise is a music box for children. Their version of the “Rock my Sleep” box comes pre-loaded with six Gotthard songs arranged as instrumental lullabies; when the child is older and wants real music or audiobooks the contents can be swapped, and it ships in a Gotthard pouch.
Pre-orders for “Stereo Crush” opened on 20 January 2025 in four shapes: a digipak CD, a jewel-case CD, red marbled vinyl and digital.
The third advance track from “Stereo Crush”, “Rusty Rose”, was released with a lyric video on 21 February 2025 — exactly a month before the album.
The “Stereo Crush” tour opened on 23 May 2025 at the RuhrCongress in Bochum. Posting the next day, the band singled out the crew who had put up and wired their newly designed stage for the first time in record time, and thanked both them and the audience.
In August 2025 the band were asked at short notice to fill in at the H2U Open Air in Uster, after the singer of the billed act Mando Diao was taken to hospital twenty-four hours before the show. Their management spent an evening assembling a crew and got a Gotthard set running within a few hours, in front of a sold-out field, and the band went out of their way afterwards to thank a crew that was partly new to them.
On 7 June 2025 the band played the Sweden Rock Festival, a stage they had stood on several times before: the official archive lists Sölvesborg dates in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2017 and 2025.
The video for “Burning Bridges” was released on 1 May 2025 to mark the album’s chart success. The band explained that after the three earlier singles had been taken up, this track had been closing on them on streaming platforms — which is why they made a clip for it.
“Ride The Wave”, released with a lyric video on 22 September 2025, was the first sign of the mini-album “More Stereo Crush”, announced with the promise of further new tracks and surprises in the months before it appeared.
Chris von Rohr looked back on his time with Gotthard as eleven years of intense and successful work. He also explained where the title came from: the Beatles, out of Liverpool, had helped him enormously in his early days, and his way of starting a song is to look first for a title that does not exist yet — after which, he says, the rest tends to follow.
“More Stereo Crush” came out as an eight-track mini-album on RPM on 13 March 2026. As on “Stereo Crush” it was produced by Charlie Bauerfeind and Leo Leoni and mastered by Sascha Bühren, with artwork by Manuel Schütz and Thomas Ewerhard.
“Smiling In The Pouring Rain” is a stripped-back song led by Nic Maeder’s voice. Leo Leoni said he wanted a positive feeling in it: life can turn sad, but something good always comes sooner or later, so keep believing in what you do and in yourself. Maeder described life as a never-ending roller coaster and the track as their own take on “Singin’ in the Rain”.
What went onto “More Stereo Crush” was five previously unreleased songs from the “Stereo Crush” sessions, “Mayday” — until then available only as a video — a radio edit of the ballad “Burning Bridges”, and the duet version of “Liverpool” with Marc Storace. It was issued as an MCD, a limited mini LP, a CD bundle with “Stereo Crush” and digitally.
The club’s supporters took part in the recordings. The band met the Curva Nord at the new AIL Arena and cut many of the vocal parts there with them, so the voices of the tifosi are in the songs and the atmosphere of the ground came with them. Martin Blaser, the club’s vice-president and CEO, described the project as bringing together two Ticino institutions.
Two of the founding members are still in the current line-up: guitarist Leo Leoni and bassist Marc Lynn, alongside Freddy Scherer, Nic Maeder and drummer Flavio Mezzodi. The label biography adds that having three principal songwriters inside the band is why the ideas keep coming.
The reunion with Chris von Rohr came more than twenty years after they had last worked together. What they made with their former co-producer and writing partner was “Liverpool” on “Stereo Crush”, and the duet version grew out of it; the label biography describes the song as a positive, up-tempo rocker that adds another colour to the album.
Charlie Bauerfeind is often called the band’s unofficial sixth member. Leo Leoni calls him a workaholic like themselves and says that after so many years together there is a great deal they no longer need to discuss — creatively, the understanding between them is complete.
The scale the label sets out in 2026 is more than thirty years of work, seventeen number one albums in Switzerland and over 3.5 million records sold — the figures that go with calling them the country’s most successful band.
The official site is plain about why Hena Habegger left. In 2019 the drummer they called their “Groove Machine” decided to end his music career with Gotthard so as to have more time for his family — and the page adds that friends remain friends, and that they are glad every time they meet again.
Every entry on the band page is a short statement in the member’s own words. Leo Leoni’s begins with falling in love with his Les Paul at the age of twelve, goes on to falling in love a few years later with rock’n’roll and with the dream of a rock’n’roll band, and ends by saying he is still in love, still dreaming and still rocking.
The entry for the current drummer, Flavio Mezzodi, sets out an attitude to life — unconditional, passionate, plain rock’n’roll — resting on solidarity, loyalty and idealism. His own website address is printed beneath it, the only entry on the page that points to a member’s personal site.
The oldest line in the archive is 27 February 1992 at Jelmoli in Zürich. That same year carries 81 dates, more than any other year in the whole archive — the year of their first album is also the year they played more shows than they ever would again.
October 1992 stands out in the archive. The band appear at the Foundation Forum in Los Angeles on three consecutive days from the 1st, then cross to Britain and play eighteen dates between the 9th and the 28th; Hammersmith in London follows on 3 December. A single month of entries shows them already working the American and British circuits in their first year.
The 2007 East Asian trip did not stop in Japan. After Shibuya O-East on 18 September and Club Quattro in Osaka on the 19th, the band crossed to the Rolling Hall in Seoul on the 21st — the only line in the whole official archive with Korea in the country column.
For a hard rock band, Montreux turns up unusually often in the archive: the Montreux Festival on 7 July 1994, the Casino in 1997, 1999 and 2001, and the Jazz Festival itself on 14 July 2006. Five lines that make them regulars in a town known for jazz.
They went to South America in two concentrated runs. In May 2012 they played Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo and Mexico City between the 12th and the 20th; in December 2014 it was Buenos Aires, Asunción, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Santiago and Mexico City between the 2nd and the 13th. The 2012 dates were also where Nic Maeder made his live debut with the band.
After three nights in Los Angeles in October 1992, the archive adds only two more American entries: 70000 Tons of Metal on 28 January 2013 and the Monsters of Rock Cruise — spelled “Cruize” in the archive — on 22 February 2016, both with Miami in the city column. Set against the number of European dates, America stayed a long way off for this band.
The Hallenstadion in Zürich turns up four times in the archive, spelled differently each time: “Hallenstadion” for 13 October 1996 and 23 September 2015, “Hallen Stadion” for 8 December 2005, and “HallenstadionZürich”, venue and city run together, for 2 December 2023. The December 2005 night is the one that became the live release “Made in Switzerland”.
“Boom Boom” was released on 29 November 2024, the same day the album was announced — put out, as the band themselves said, to shorten the wait until the record arrived.
The band’s new year greeting doubled as the release announcement: on 2 January 2025 they wished everyone a happy new year and, in the same post, lifted the curtain on 21 March as the date for “Stereo Crush”.
The second advance track, “Thunder & Lightning”, came out on 17 January 2025. Releasing a song with bright lead lines and a love story in it while much of the world was still under snow, the band called it an early hint of spring.
The label announcement came bundled with a promise of live dates: the press release of 7 October 2024 said in one breath that “Stereo Crush” was being finalised and that the band would be back on stage from May 2025.
One of the formats offered for “Stereo Crush” was a t-shirt bundle that included a signed card, listed by the label alongside the CD, the coloured vinyl and the streaming release.
The circumstances were reported through Nevada Highway Patrol spokesman Joe Fackrell. At around 5:15 p.m. on 5 October the riders had stopped on the shoulder of northbound Interstate 15, some fifty miles north of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, to put on rain gear when a semitrailer swerved and struck one of the parked Harley-Davidsons. The same report notes that Lee had a British father and a Swiss mother.
Lee had already been in a crash two months earlier. On 7 August 2010, driving home from a short holiday, his car was hit from behind on the motorway near Florence in a pile-up involving several other vehicles. He put out a statement through the band’s record company to say that he was unhurt and that he seemed to have a rock-loving guardian angel looking after him.
One of the first musicians to respond was Chris von Rohr, the Krokus founder who had also been Gotthard’s producer for years. Speaking to the Swiss daily Blick, he said he was lost for words and offered his condolences to Lee’s parents.
The public memorial for Lee was held on the morning of 17 October 2010 at the St. Gotthard Hospice, up on the Gotthard Pass itself. Thousands of fans gathered in wintry, sub-zero weather alongside the band and Lee’s partner Brigitte Voss-Balzarini; that a hospice on a mountain pass was the venue says something about the scale of the farewell.
The statement the band issued after the accident lays out the route they had planned. They had set off from Los Angeles and come through Death Valley and Las Vegas; the next stop was to be St. George in Utah, and from there Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon and Monument Valley. St. George, the statement adds, was where Lee had meant to surprise Brigitte with a piece of jewellery he had picked out.
The same statement describes what happened at the roadside. The group secured the scene, began first aid and called 911; the first patrol car arrived within minutes and the officer used a defibrillator, a second car brought a full set of emergency equipment and a helicopter came in as well. Resuscitation went on in the pouring rain until a doctor finally confirmed the death. The statement also notes that nobody else in the party was hurt.
The funeral itself was a private one. On 21 October 2010 the urn holding Lee’s ashes was placed in the cemetery of Porza, the Ticino village he came from. Those present were his parents, who had flown in from Spain, his sister Karin Nicholls and her family, his partner Brigitte Voss-Balzarini, the surviving members of the band and a handful of friends and neighbours.
The scale of the Swiss television coverage shows in the running times. The entertainment programme “Glanz & Gloria” gave its edition of 6 October 2010 over to Lee with an eleven-minute German-language segment, and the same show reported from the memorial service eleven days later.
One of the last shows Lee played had already been recorded for a live album before the accident. “Homegrown - Alive In Lugano” captures the Lugano concert of 17 July 2010, among the final handful with him, and its release was put back after his death until 30 September 2011 on Nuclear Blast. Marc Lynn said that Lugano was where all of it had started, so the circle had closed there.
That Lugano concert was part of a local HOG rally, the annual gathering of Harley-Davidson riders. Every member of the band rides a Harley and they play such events, and take part in them, whenever they can — and shows in Lugano itself have been rare for them. Freddy Scherer remembered Lee being warmer and in better spirits than he had been for a long time that night, with more than twenty thousand people on the piazza and the connection between singer and crowd as strong as it could be.
Ahead of that live album, on 2 September 2011, a previously unreleased track called “The Train” was made available — a recording with Lee singing, put out while the band were still looking for a new voice. The same announcement described the album as marking the end of an era for them.
That Maeder also plays guitar and piano and writes songs counted heavily in his favour. Rather than describe their new singer at length, the band decided it was quicker to let people hear him, and recorded a song and a video that they gave away as a free download: “Remember It’s Me”, dedicated to the fans who had stayed with them. Marc Lynn wrote that stepping into such footsteps takes real courage, and that Maeder had earned their respect for it.
The cover of “Firebirth” shows the phoenix. The announcement explained the image in terms of rising from the ashes into the sky — a line meant to stand both for what the band’s audience felt and for the period the group had just come through. Leo Leoni described the record as a comeback with a “back to basics” rating: sound and production deliberately returned to their roots and to a plain, recognisably Gotthard tone.
The thirteenth and closing track of “Firebirth”, “Where Are You?”, was listed with a dedication to Steve Lee from the moment the track listing was announced. The first album with a new singer therefore ends on a song written for the one who came before him.
The first single of the new line-up, “Starlight”, was among the very first songs Maeder and the band wrote together. Leo Leoni called it unusual to sit down with someone and immediately come up with the song that ends up being the single, and Maeder said the atmosphere was relaxed from the start and ideas came easily. The single appeared on 20 April 2012 in two versions, one rock and one acoustic.
The second song unveiled from “Firebirth” was premiered not in Europe but in South America. “Give Me Real” went out on 16 May 2012 on the show “La Ley del Rock” on the Chilean station Radio Futuro, with an introduction by Leo Leoni himself — and the first live shows of the new line-up were being played in South America at the same time.
The video for “Starlight” was shot in a disused animal-feed factory outside Berlin — the same building where scenes for Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” had been filmed.
The first album made with the new singer entered the Swiss chart at number one — the fourteenth time a Gotthard record had gone to the top there. In Germany it reached number nine on the Media Control chart.
In 2020, ten years after Lee’s death, the band assembled the tribute album “Steve Lee: The Eyes Of A Tiger”. It began with the discovery of unheard recordings from his last ever session, around which they built an unplugged record. Songs including “One Life One Soul”, “Heaven” and “Lift U Up” were remade in a far more fragile form, with his successor Nic Maeder kept in the background, and an acoustic reading of Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger” closes the set.
The band called the reworkings on the memorial album their “distilled” versions. The songs were drawn from right across their catalogue — “G.”, “Homerun”, “Lipservice”, “Human Zoo” and the debut — with “Let It Be” turned from big arena rock into something folky and acoustic and “Lift U Up” recast in a country style. An unreleased song called “Tarot Woman” is also included; it is not the Rainbow song of that name.
The tenth-anniversary project was not meant to be an album alone. A tribute concert had also been under consideration, but the coronavirus outbreak made it impossible, as the Japanese release coverage noted at the time. The memorial show would eventually happen three years later.
“Lipservice” came out in Europe in June 2005 through G.Records and Nuclear Blast. In January 2006 it was certified platinum in Switzerland for sales above forty thousand, and the plaques were handed over in Zürich during an event billed as the “PISA Finals”.
On 27 April 2006 the band played an unplugged concert at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Lucerne. Admission was free, and because the room held only so many people the seats went on a first-come basis. Earlier that day they were interviewed on the Swiss presenter Claudia Laesser’s talk show, which also gave a first look at the DVD “Made in Switzerland”, released the following day.
The live release “Made in Switzerland” gave the band their tenth consecutive Swiss number one in 2006, ahead of new records by Tool and Pearl Jam. It paired a CD and a DVD built from seventeen songs recorded at the Hallenstadion in Zürich in December 2005.
“Domino Effect” went into recording late in 2006 and appeared on 27 April 2007, produced by Leo Leoni with Ronald Prent, who had worked on “Lipservice” before it. When the sleeve was unveiled Leoni was already calling it the best album Gotthard had ever put out.
The video for the “Domino Effect” single “The Call” was filmed in 2007 at the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, directed by Martin Mueller of RCN-TV, using the hotel’s Richard Wagner salon and its honeymoon suite. Marc Lynn told a local newspaper that precisely because the song was a traditional ballad they wanted the clip to be anything but, and gave as an example a restaurant scene in which a waitress serves Steve Lee and his companion a cut-out heart.
How far outside Europe the band’s press reach went shows in an interview Freddy Scherer gave on 7 June 2007 — to “ZanZanA”, a metal show on the Tunisian station RTCI, covering “Domino Effect”, the state of the Swiss heavy music scene and the band’s own influences.
“Need to Believe” was released on 4 September 2009 through Nuclear Blast, with a digital single going out three weeks earlier on 14 August. That autumn the band toured Europe as co-headliners with Sweden’s Europe, playing a run of German dates together.
By 2009 the tally being quoted for the band was eleven number one albums in Switzerland and six top ten singles. In Europe they had opened for AC/DC, Deep Purple, Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi, and had played the Montreux Jazz Festival. Their awards included two Prix Walo at home and Monaco’s International Music Award, and their music had been used on the soundtrack of the European television series “Frankie”.
“Need to Believe” was certified platinum at home in Switzerland for sales over thirty thousand. The plaques were presented on 9 January 2010 during the televised “Swiss Awards 2009”, an evening that also carried the television premiere of the radio single “Don’t Let Me Down” — the last major award the band collected with Steve Lee.
The video for “Unconditional Faith” was shot in Zagreb, Croatia, in the summer of 2009. The performance footage was filmed inside the boxing ring used for the film in which the boxing champion Henry Maske played Max Schmeling.
“Bang!” was released on 7 April 2014 through PIAS. Charlie Bauerfeind and Leo Leoni recorded and produced it at the band’s own Yellow House Studios in Lugano, in the canton of Ticino, and Ronald Prent mixed it at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands.
The closing track of “Bang!”, “Thank You”, runs past ten minutes with an orchestra behind it, well outside anything radio would take. The announcement explained that Leo Leoni had written it for his late mother, and that it was meant as a tribute to mothers in general.
The ballad “Maybe” on “Bang!” was cut as a duet with Melody Tibbits, an American singer who was then still unknown. The same album carries the bluesy “Spread Your Wings”, and the boogie groove of the title track was presented as new ground for the band.
In North America “Bang!” came out on The End Records, and it arrived in two stages: the digital version on 24 June 2014 and a deluxe edition with three extra tracks on 12 August.
Asked to place “Bang!” against the earlier records, Hena Habegger said the closest in sound was probably “Lipservice” from 2005 — but with a more playful feel to it, and with an arrangement surprise or two along the way.
The video for “C’est La Vie”, from “Bang!”, was shot on location in Cuba. Behind-the-scenes footage went online in October 2014, five days after the clip itself.
In 2015 the band appeared in “Ghosts On The Road”, a documentary series made by FreqsTV about what touring life is actually like. Nic Maeder and Marc Lynn talk about the sense of being cut off from the world, about the teamwork between band and crew, and about why they chose to continue after Steve Lee’s death. Lynn described missing home and family as the very thing that gives you something new to write about.
The twelfth album, “Silver”, was made at the Yellow House Studio in Lugano and released on 13 January 2017, through Musikvertrieb in Switzerland and PIAS internationally. It was the third record with Nic Maeder, and Charlie Bauerfeind produced it with Leo Leoni as they had done on “Bang!” — the band said everyone had been happy with how that one went, so working together again was the obvious move.
The title “Silver” comes from the way wedding anniversaries are named. In their announcement the band pointed out that they had already left paper, leather, wood, crystal and china behind them, so twenty-five years of Gotthard called for a proper silver wedding — and the album duly arrived on that anniversary.
The release of “Silver” was followed straight away by a European tour billed as the 25th Anniversary, opening in Ravensburg in Germany with Denmark’s Pretty Maids in support. Leo Leoni noted that twenty-five years meant a hundred and fifty songs to choose from before you even counted the new album — not an easy job, but they would pick only the best for a proper anniversary party.
The first single from “Silver”, “Stay With Me”, was released on 18 November 2016 — nearly two months ahead of the album, and at a point when the album still had no announced title.
In February 2017, in the middle of the European tour for “Silver”, Hena Habegger had to drop out for health reasons. Helloween’s Dani Löble stepped in, and the band thanked him for learning the set in no time and saving the Frankfurt show — the two groups already had a connection through their producer, Bauerfeind.
The video for “Miss Me”, taken from “Silver”, appeared in July 2017 and was directed by Martin Häusler.
Britain’s Classic Rock was of two minds about “Silver”. Its reviewer allowed that the band’s third album with Nic Maeder, made for their twenty-fifth anniversary, works well enough where it gets things right, but wondered aloud whether quite so many mid-paced tracks had been necessary.
The thirteenth studio album was called “#13”, it came out on 13 March 2020, and the standard jewel-case edition carried thirteen tracks. The packaging of the record is, in effect, that number three times over.
The advance single “Missteria” was written with Francis Rossi. Leo Leoni said at the announcement that it had been great fun to write a track with Francis again and that he believed they had delivered a real killer — the word “again” making clear that this was not the first time the two had written together.
The video for “Missteria” was shot at the Madi-Zelt in Berlin, framing the band’s performance in velvet, mirrors, fog and LED effects with dancers moving through it. The song itself sets flourishes of oriental instrumentation against a plainly rock structure, and the clip was built out from that.
The American producer Paul Lani produced “#13” with Leo Leoni as co-producer. It was recorded at the Yellow House Studio in Lugano, mixed in Los Angeles, and given its final touches by Darcy Proper at Valhalla Studios in New York.
The stand-out on “#13” is a cover of ABBA’s worldwide hit “S.O.S.”. Around it the album ranges from a forceful opener through fast, heavy material and a song built on a blunt lyrical message to old-school blues rock, big ballads and unbridled 1970s psychedelia — a spread the announcement presented as the point of the record.
“#13” was issued in three shapes: the thirteen-track jewel case, a limited collector’s box pairing a digipak with two bonus tracks with a bandana and a poster-booklet, and a double LP that also carried the two bonus tracks.
The figures being quoted when “#13” was announced at the start of 2020 were sixteen number one albums, more than three million records sold worldwide and over two thousand live shows — a tally still growing twenty-five years past the band’s beginnings.
A German tour was announced to follow the release of “#13” from April 2020, with Magnum as special guests and a Swiss run alongside their old friends Shakra to come after it.
Where Gotthard sat in the 1990s can be read off the import listings: the second album, “Dial Hard”, is credited to Ariola Records in Germany — a different starting point from the Nuclear Blast, PIAS and Reigning Phoenix Music years that followed.
In his comment on the signing, RPM managing director Jochen Richert put Gotthard next to William Tell as the definitive heroes of Switzerland, saying the label was proud to welcome the country’s biggest rock band.
The figures the label set out at the end of 2024 were specific: sixteen number one albums in Switzerland, a Diamond Award for selling more than a million units there, multiple platinum records including the quadruple-platinum “Homerun”, a platinum single in “Heaven”, seven top ten singles, more than 3.5 million units worldwide and over two thousand shows.
Leo Leoni wrote “Boom Boom”, the first single from “Stereo Crush”, when he learned that he was going to be a father. He described the birth of his son Gabriel as something that changed his life completely, and the song as his way of setting down what he feels when he holds the boy or catches his smile.
A guitar idea Freddy Scherer brought round to Maeder’s house started “Thunder & Lightning”. The two worked out the structure and the vocal melodies and recorded a demo there, after which Maeder spent a while on the words: the chorus riff sounded electric to him, which led to lightning and thunder, and he turned the saying that lightning never strikes twice inside out to make it a metaphor for love. French, which he speaks, also has an expression that likens love at first sight to being hit by a bolt of lightning.
The cover of “Stereo Crush” is by Thomas Ewerhard, who had worked with the band before. The artwork was revealed on 17 January 2025, the day pre-orders opened worldwide, with the album itself following two months later on 21 March.
The new singer was introduced through interviews before there was an album to talk about: on 30 January 2012 the Italian outlet SpazioRock put out a filmed conversation with Nic Maeder, four months ahead of “Firebirth”.
Before “Firebirth” appeared the band put out a series of track-by-track commentary films. The fourth instalment, released on 22 May 2012, covered the album’s fourth song, “Fight” — the first record of the new line-up being introduced one track at a time.
Short previews of the title track and “C’est La Vie” went online on 20 March 2014, eighteen days before “Bang!” itself.
The video for “Feel What I Feel”, the first single from “Bang!”, arrived with behind-the-scenes footage in April 2014, immediately after the album itself.