By Paul Robicheau

Anybody at Tuesday’s show who thought the members of Kraftwerk were just punching buttons at their static posts while audiovisuals surged automatically would be mistaken.

Kraftwerk at Boch Wang Theater. Photo: Paul Robicheau

“We are the robots.” Those vocoder-filtered words launched Kraftwerk’s Boch Wang Theatre encore as a screen showed the automaton movements of four mannequins, body doubles to the men behind podiums across the stage.

Such was the implied merger of man and machine that the godfathers of electronic music forged in the 1970s. But anybody at Tuesday’s show who thought the members of Kraftwerk were just punching buttons at their static posts while audiovisuals surged automatically would be mistaken.

Sure, there were plenty of buttons to push, for prerecorded sequencers and mechanized beats. But Ralf Hütter, who co-founded Kraftwerk with the late Florian Schneider in 1970, still played his trademark synth melodies at the left podium, lending human-sounding vocals via a headset microphone. Henning Schmitz also manned a keyboard next to Hütter, while Falk Grieffenhagen and Georg Bongartz handled electronic percussion and video monitoring. Lined grids on their jumpsuits glowed like the neon edging of their platforms.

Ralf Hütter and Henning Schmitz of Kraftwerk at Boch Wang Theatre. Photo: Paul Robicheau

The show, billed as “Multimedia Tour 2025” (though its presentation was very similar to Kraftwerk’s last Wang appearance a decade ago), was also said to be celebrating 50 years of the 1974 album Autobahn. Yet the only piece played from that groundbreaking record was its title track (at less than half the length of its original 22 minutes), a percolating glide where synths swooshed by like cars, as shown passing along that German highway in low-tech animation.

In contrast, the group performed most of its more danceable 1978 album The Man-Machine, from the title track (which initiated the red-and-black palette carried into the shirt-and-tie figures of “The Robots”) to the pulsing pop tune “The Model” (backed by footage from vintage fashion shows) and dreamy synth lullaby “Neon Lights,” where iconic German signs floated on-screen.

Between those albums alone, Kraftwerk influenced David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (“V-2 Schneider” on Heroes was named after Hütter’s co-creator), synth-pop groups like the Human League, Ultravox, and Depeche Mode, Detroit techno (given a shout-out in “Planet of Visions” during Tuesday’s encore) and electro/hip-hop innovator Afrika Bambaataa. Kraftwerk was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, a year after Schneider’s death.

Kraftwerk at Boch Wang Theatre. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Kraftwerk was particularly active in the ’70s (beginning as a free-form outfit with keys, flute, and drums under the krautrock umbrella) and into the ’80s. Tuesday’s concert began with a mashup from 1981’s Computer World, an album that presaged our obsession with digital technology, echoed by a blinking onscreen overlay of numerical codes and vibrant color bars.

The homestretch likewise kept the imagery moving. “Radio-activity” played to that term’s dual meanings, from a radio tower to the universal nuclear symbol, while flashing names of atomic bomb and meltdown sites. Tracks from 2003’s Tour de France Soundtracks cycled to scenes of that famous race, while “La Forme” hypnotized with oscillating blue lines as Hütter held a hand next to his face to heighten breathy vocals. Then Hütter pressed into the chords of 1977’s “Trans-Europe Express” like the phantom of the electro-opera. A sleek train traversed the backdrop, mirroring that track’s minimalist lines as Kraftwerk showcased continued themes of transportation and motion within its kinetic hum.

By the time the encore closed with “Musique Non-Stop,” showing 3D musical notes and symbols floating free of a staff, the audio-visual barrage began to wear, partly due to overly loud rhythm tracks. But, when the quartet finally stopped at the two-hour mark, the members walked off one by one, after each injected a splash of sound that then dropped from the mix. The last to leave the stage, to applause, was Hütter. Looking fit at age 78, he bowed and placed his hand over his heart, still beating as the real man behind the Kraftwerk machine.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.