They may have once been a metal band, but you never would have known it when Weilheim, Germany’s the Notwist stopped at the 9:30 Club on Wednesday night, in support of their latest long player, the excellent The Devil, You + Me. Nearly 20 years into their career, the band seems to have settled into a more mature, introspective groove, largely trading in guitar-based indie-pop with pronounced electronic underpinnings.

While the band managed to pack more samplers, sequencers and delay pedals on to the 9:30 Club’s stage than we’ve ever seen, it was the more novel use of gear that really resonated. Frontman Markus Acher, for example, stood in front of two turntables for the majority of the set, occasionally peppering the band’s compositions with samples culled from vinyl in real-time. The band’s aptly-nicknamed programmer, Martin “Console” Gretschmann, meanwhile, used two hacked Nintendo Wiimote controllers to control his sequencers — a geeky yet innovative gimmick you might expect to see on the front page of Boing Boing, but wouldn’t necessarily expect a well-established act to employ. Nonetheless, all of this digital trickery only served to augment the band’s warm, earnest compositions, underlining the tension between man and machine that both informs and drives much of the Notwist’s work.