Formed in 2023, the indie surf rock band Cactus for Breakfast hails from Berlin. They include members from Germany, the US, and Indonesia coalescing into a high-energy sound that is toothy and will have you humming days after.
The “Cactus Boys” are Robin Wilms and Shane Wagner on vocals & guitar, Thomas Dwi Putra on bass, and Timo Wunderlich on drums. As we will learn in the following interview, the band harmoniously blends influences from garage, blues, and psychedelic to country, and their enthusiasm for musical exploration is contagious.
Cactus for Breakfast just had an eventful summer supporting the release of their mini album Horsemilk Hangover, a catchy set of 5 tracks brimming with style and satisfying hooks. I was thrilled to speak with the band over email about their summer, backgrounds, future touring plans, and the release of several new singles in 2025— starting with “Take Me Where You Go,” which just dropped.
I can’t wait until you hear its gritty surf rhythm, glimmering riffs, rolling drums and dirty trip into psychedelia.
JLM: I really enjoyed watching your “What It’s Really Like to Tour in an Indie Band” on YouTube to get a sense of the band and music. It looks like you are having fun. How did you come together as a band?
Robin: All of the Cactus Boys have moved to Berlin a couple of years ago — in Berlin, you’d call us “Zugezogene” (meaning “the ones that moved to Berlin and have not actually grown up there”). Berlin is full of music, besides the huge techno scene it also offers a great scene for alternative music. Since we’ve all played music for nearly all our lives, each of us looked for other musicians to jam with. We all checked out the community board of a local rehearsal space, found a fitting post and voilà — beginning of 2023 we were jamming for the first time together. We enjoyed the jams a lot, started playing some covers and the first originals. After some structural changes we found our drummer Timo at the end of 2023 and are cooking up tunes in this formation ever since.
JLM: You have been playing a lot of gigs following your June 2024 release Horsemilk Hangover and it looks like the band is motivated to tour. Are there any locales you dream about outside Berlin or Germany as the band grows?
Robin: The shows in 2024 were incredible! We had the chance to play more than 10 gigs over the year — a lot of them in Berlin. Through a befriended band from Hamburg (“The Figs”) we also played some shows in Hamburg, Bremen and on the “Wheels and Wake Festival”. Right now we were on a winter break and we are all craving to play shows again. Our goal is definitely to play more gigs around Germany, especially in cities such as Leipzig, Dresden, Cologne or Dortmund. We applied to a lot of music festivals and are hopeful to be considered for lineup at some of those. Since we’re releasing our new EP in the summer 2025 we’re planning an EP-release-tour and want to make gigs all over Germany and maybe even some international cities such as Warsaw or Prague happen. Besides that, we are in contact with some bands from the UK and will most probably play some shows in the UK in May! We’re really excited for all the upcoming shows!
JLM: Cactus for Breakfast seems to be on a creative streak with a string of singles to be released in 2025 — starting with “Take Me Where You Go” on January 7th. How are the songs coming to the band right now? In rehearsal, while touring? Both?
Robin: That’s a tough question (haha)! It always depends on the songs, since they come to the band in different ways. There are definitely songs which we create together as we jam in our rehearsal space. The majority of songs is a personal creation of either me or Shane though. For me, the best lyrics or song ideas come up in the shower or in the train. Sometimes I’m in a total flow and just write down the lyrics all at once (that happened with out upcoming single “Cigarette”, which will come out on 4th of February). At other times I might just hum some melody while doodling around on my guitar — sometimes it just clicks together and a song idea is brought to life.
Another great way for me to come up with songs and refining their structure is using my DAW (I use Logic Proc X) and sketching out some song ideas. I really enjoy the songwriting process, especially when the ideas just flow naturally. Nonetheless, it can also be quite frustrating sometimes, especially when it’s too “forced”. It’s easiest for me to write songs when I’m in the right mood or have a strong emotion such as being sad, in grief or thankful. That was also the case when I came up with the lyrics and core structure for “Lonely Boy” (our third single which will drop on 4th of March). The story behind it is that I lost a very good friend of mine in 2023 — I used music to cope with my feelings of grief and sort of related the song to him. When I presented the idea of the song to the other guys, Thomas came up with some really cool ideas for the chord progression and structure of the song. Shane helped me to extend and refine the lyrics and we had a new song!
Shane: For me music always comes before lyrics. Things will usually come to me at home while playing around on the guitar and I’ll get a small interesting idea and record it onto my phone’s sound recording app. I do that quite a lot and then usually on a long train ride I’ll go through the ideas I came up with and sort through the ideas that I still find interesting and want to expand on and the ones that can stay as ideas. Then after I have an idea I can pretty easily come up with the instrumentation around then it’s the uphill battle of coming up with lyrics for the song. Sometimes I’ll present something I’m working on to Robin and he’ll pull up some lyrics on his phone that he wrote and the two ideas will merge together into something really cool. This happened with one of my favorite songs that we play called ‘Vitamin B’ (which is also coming out later in 2025). I had an idea for a riff and a general chord progression and Robin pulls up his phone and starts singing these really cool lyrics that fit the song perfectly. It doesn’t always happen that easily but it’s a really cool moment when it comes together.
Overall: When we share our ideas with the band we try them out, see where we might need to make adjustments and finalise the songs together to get them stage-ready. Sometimes we have all the instrumental parts already arranged, at other times Thomas and Timo come up with exciting melodies and rhythms at home or in the rehearsal space and we blend them together as a band.
JLM: Your song titles are curious and hint to a tradition of playful naming shared by many contemporary psych bands. What was the inspiration for the band name?
Robin: That question has been asked many times in concert by the audience, we want to give the question back to the readers. What do you think is the right answer? We’re called “Cactus for Breakfast” because …
we went to a secluded hut in the alps, met this Shaman from Belgium and he invited us to his ceremony. We ate cactus for breakfast and were tripping hard.
we were on a house party, all drunk and fucking around with potential band names. Someone picked up a potted cactus and the names Cactus Erectus came up. Sober we decided on a a more tame version.
Timo lived in Mexico for several years. He ate cactus (=nopales) in his breakfast tacos quite regularly.
JLM: Cactus for Breakfast is diverse and international, with members from Germany, Indonesia and The US. How does that inform your dynamic as a band?
Robin: Let’s start with Thomas. Thomas comes from Jakarta, Indonesia — a nation that’s famous for their surfing culture (and music scene!). His island boy vibes definitely sharp our surfy and drippy sound. Flying over to the US, where Shane grew up. Shane is the real country boy, growing up in a small town in Michigan before moving out to Colorado and then eventually to Berlin. His love of classic country records has a big impact on our music — be it his favourite orange Tele, his chicken picking or even hog-calling. Me (Robin) and Timo both grew up in western Germany (but only met once we both were in Berlin) and have both lived and travelled internationally for many years (Australia, UK, Netherlands to name a few) resulting in german rock energy with a weave of psychedelia and surf. Drawing on all our eclectic influences, we strive to craft a sound that combines drippy reverb, psychedelic textures, thumbing basslines and overall good vibes.
JLM: I love the groove-heavy sounds of the band pulling at threads from blues, garage, surf with hints of western and a step further into psychedelic with your upcoming single. You mention classic influences from The Doors and Velvet Underground (and I can hear some early Stones) to contemporaries like The Nude Party, The Grogans, and Sun Room. I am so fascinated with the lineage of surf and how it blends with genres and generations across the world. What was the gateway into surf for some of the band members? Why is surf sound compelling to you?
Shane: I’ve always been a genre diver, I will get into one genre and then just try to find as much as I can and listen to everything in it. I had a streak of hyper-fixation on The Beatles when I was in middle school and would listen to no other band but eventually from there I widened my scope but was still mainly listening to music from the 1960s (The Band, The Doors, Bob Dylan, The Troggs). One day at a record store I bought on a whim a Ventures record because I liked the cover and that’s where the surf interest really started for me. So I started listening to the whole canon of instrumental surf (special shout out to The Astronauts for having the greatest reverb sound of any surf band). I loved the huge swelling sounds, the driving rhythms and the simple but somehow lyrical melodies. I’ve never surfed once in my life but the music of 60s So-Cal really spoke to me somehow. Since we’ve been doing the project I’ve gotten more into modern surf bands too, mainly though Robin.
Robin: I used to do work and travel in Australia as a gap-year. During that time I discovered the Australian surf (music) scene. I’ve started surfing there, enjoyed the laid-back vibe of the surfers, started checking out the music that was playing in hostels, bars etc. and have been following the modern surf music scene ever since.
Timo: I fell in love with surf music through concerts in the Berlin music scene and was fascinated by the juxtaposition of beachy surf vibes and Berlin’s bustling, urban environment.
Thomas: I grew up listening to a lot of different music, but when we started this project, the surf sound immediately felt familiar for me. In Indonesia, it’s an emerging genre, with bands like The Panturas repopularizing it after earlier pioneers like Eka Sapta. It fascinates me how they could capture the nostalgic vibe of old movies my dad used to watch and bring it back with a fresh, modern retro twist.
Cactus for Breakfast:
Jessica Lee McMillan © 2025
Comments