War nie weg

About the song

«War nie weg» — "never gone" — is a Berlin rap single released in mid-September 2026 by Ufo361, with the singer-rapper Souly and the pop duo Blumengarten as guests. It lasts two minutes and forty seconds, came out on Stay High, the label Ufo361 founded in 2017, and was presented as a preview of his album «Waldemar Hof», announced for 2 October 2026. The German hip-hop site hiphop.de described the track as a meeting of worlds that nobody had quite expected, and that is the first thing a listener notices: a trap beat and a street-rap verse sit next to a sung, almost indie-pop hook.

Ufo361 is the stage name of Ufuk Bayraktar, born in West Berlin in May 1988 and raised in Kreuzberg, in a family with Turkish and Kurdish roots. The name joins the first letters of his given name to 36 and 61, the old postal districts of Kreuzberg. He started out as a graffiti writer, became known nationally in 2015 with the viral video «Ich bin ein Berliner», and by 2018 was topping the German album chart with «808», a record that brought the dreamy, auto-tuned sound of American cloud rap into German. He has a habit of announcing breaks and then coming back: in July 2018 he said he would stop to put his family first, and in March 2019 he was releasing music again.

Read against that biography, the title makes sense as a statement about his own career rather than a line about a lover. The refrain answers a question the listener keeps asking — where are you? — with the claim that the speaker never went anywhere. The verses then do what German street rap often does: they list proofs of success. There is money arriving on its own, a house bought for a price in the millions, a luxury car, a wardrobe crammed with designer clothes, a bag full of Swiss francs and a joke about Swiss cheese. There are comparisons with famous figures from fashion and music. And at the end there is a twist: years ago he promised he would come back, and now he admits that promise was a lie, because he had never left.

Two guests change the colour of the song. Souly, born Luca Carlo Politano in 1997 and raised in the Münsterland countryside, is a singer as much as a rapper, with Italian roots, a background in gospel choirs and a psychology degree course in Osnabrück behind him; his 2023 album made him one of the new names of German pop-rap. Blumengarten are a duo from Velbert in North Rhine-Westphalia, the singer Rayan Djima and the guitarist and producer Samuel Eickmann, who started recording in a basement in 2021 and write mostly about growing up. Their debut album, «Ich liebe dich für immer», arrived in March 2025. Putting them on a track with one of Berlin’s hardest-edged rappers is exactly the "unexpected link-up" the press talked about.