Hit and Miss in the Heartbreak Hotel
Dutch-German Luna Morgenstern’s EP «heartbreak hotel» glitters in all shades of hyperpop. Some tracks excel, and others try a tad too much.
Dutch-German Luna Morgenstern’s EP «heartbreak hotel» glitters in all shades of hyperpop. But it’s trying a tad too much.
There were almost no hints in which direction Luna Morgenstern would develop back in 2021 when I heard (and very much enjoyed) her single In My Head. Despite having the ingredients of a catchy pop song, it felt different. The gigantic climax. Morgenstern’s impressive courage in letting down the guards and granting an intimate insight.
The latest development became more evident with 2023’s Jealous—hyperactive, catchy, UK Garage mixed with pop. But it worked perfectly, and again, Morgenstern caught my admiration.
And today, Luna Morgenstern has gone entirely down the neon-coloured rabbit hole of hyperpop. Her new Extended Play is called heartbreak hotel, and it’s packed with overwhelming tracks—aesthetically somewhere between 90s rave and 2000s bubblegum pop.

The opener, hush hush, kicks it all off with a thick layer of autotune. Admittedly, the synth melody lingering in the background has a grip but drowns under the opulent UK garage-styled beats. The track just tries a bit too hard to encompass everything and nails nothing, really.
On to the title track, and that‘s a different beast. The bell-like melody sounds already promising, almost sinister and dangerous. Then, Morgenstern‘s voice—melancholic and full of regret. A crunchy beat enters the heartbreak hotel. It’s a slow and creeping track; and one that highlights her strengths in songwriting, too.
i don’t have many belongings
backpack with my longings
leave them all at the door
—room number seven
Yes, heartbreak hotel is worthy of being called a title track. If you only listen to one track of this EP, this should be the one. It perfectly accomplishes what Morgenstern set out to do, as she states in the EP’s promotional material: «I wanted to capture the feeling of detachment right after the separation, that can almost feel like a vacuum or being stuck in emotional confinement.»
But then, we come to miss u, and while the beat has a nostalgic feel, the song, a clichée love song, is relatively bland, lapping along with nothing spicing it up. I feel I have already heard this song a thousand times.
Deep basses make a return in spiral, and Luna Morgenstern shows her experimental side even better, indulging in playful twists and surprising turns. The result is a little less accessible but more intriguing.
Coming full circle to the autotune and hyperpop excess, somebody else is indeed less overwhelming than hush hush. It has a slight hymnic quality but simultaneously feels too restrained and never truly breaks free of its constraints. In a sense, the music reflects the lyric’s tale of the ambivalence of looking for solace in a rebound while still grieving a breakup.
With free/fall, the EP finds its closure in an oddly sparsely arranged piece that puts Morgenstern’s voice and lyrics in the spotlight. Seemingly out of place among the opulent compositions, free/fall winds you down from the sensory overload that preceded. It’s also a callback to her style a few years back, to songs like In My Head: an emotionally captivating and beautiful pop sound with a very personal style of songwriting.
With heartbreak hotel Luna Morgenstern takes a shot at a conceptual record. It deals with the stages and facets of a breakup, the pain that comes with the death of love. Diving into hyperpop as a general soundscape is admittedly a risky and unexpected choice for such a sad topic.
Yet, the bold approach doesn’t always pay off. While heartbreak hotel, spiral, and free/fall provide moments of excellence, the other tracks try too hard or not hard enough.

Luna Morgenstern – heartbreak hotel
Release: 24 January 2025
- hush hush
- heartbreak hotel
- miss u
- spiral
- somebody else
- free/fall