Inundauswendig

About the song

«Inundauswendig» is a German-language single by the Berlin rapper makko and the American electronic duo The Chainsmokers, released on 21 August 2026 on makko’s own label, makko305. It is the first song The Chainsmokers have ever recorded in German. The title is a well-known German idiom, «in- und auswendig», squeezed into one word: to know something inside and out, by heart, from every side. The English translation used by the artists is simply "Inside Out".

The collaboration has a long prehistory. According to the music magazine Musikexpress, Alex Pall and Drew Taggart heard makko’s breakthrough hit «Nachts wach» about four years earlier and kept playing it. makko got in touch, a friendship grew, and in March 2026 the three finally met in a studio in Los Angeles. The song came out of a single session: makko arrived with lyrics he had been working on for months, and the duo built the music around them on the spot. The Chainsmokers admit they do not speak German, but say they understood what he meant from the way he delivered it.

makko is the stage name of Christoph Makowski, born in Berlin in February 1996 and raised in Fürstenwalde, a small town on the Spree east of the capital. He was a skateboarder before he was a rapper, posting skate clips on Instagram from 2014, and he gave up a training course in occupational therapy to try music full time. His 2022 single «Nachts wach» went to number one in Germany and Austria and turned him into one of the best-known voices of the new, melodic German rap. The Chainsmokers, formed in New York in 2012, had become global stars with «Closer», their 2016 duet with Halsey, and won a Grammy for «Don’t Let Me Down».

Musically the track sits halfway between the two worlds: a relaxed, floating EDM production in the duo’s typical style, with makko rapping and singing over it in conversational German. The German music site diffus described the atmosphere as almost weightless. The subject, however, is not light. The song is about bad habits, old patterns and the things we know are bad for us.

The story runs in two stages. In the first verse the narrator feels numb and absent, as if his own life were passing him by while he runs on autopilot. He knows he urgently has to change something, but he is afraid of failing and unsure whether to follow his own wishes or other people’s expectations. The imagery is maritime: he drifts on a raft on the open sea, sinks deep under water, and then, just as he is about to give up, sees the surface shining above him, comes up and takes a breath. In the chorus he finally feels alive again, admits he took everything for granted for far too long, and closes with a play on words that turns the old saying about human error around: people make mistakes, and mistakes are what make us human. The second verse is more confident. He admits he pretended for too long, that the bad habits have not disappeared, and that he is trying hard to keep his willpower. It ends as advice to the listener: keep your distance from what harms you, stand firm, and you can do it too.