Martín Schellekens and Martín Espinosa have never been shy about their fondness for Sonic Youth. They started out calling themselves Hey Joni, after all. But that alias didn’t last; eventually they hit on Land Whales, a name with no associations attached. I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider why they might have swapped a self-evident homage for something so oblique. Subtly surrealistic, “Land Whales” conveys a blurry constellation of ideas: brute force and sheer impossibility; weightless grace and its gravity-bound opposite. All those potential connotations take on greater significance when you consider that the group came together in Cuba and recorded its music—a fusion of grunge, post-hardcore, and shoegaze—in a Havana apartment, against all odds.
Land Whales’ sound is uncannily familiar. Their second album, How to Make a Breakfast, spins like a slide carousel of déjà vu moments: Daydream Nation’s squalling guitars, Nirvana’s sweetened hooks, Unwound’s penchant for dancing out on the shaky edge of discord. Here and there you might pick out the dirge-like drones of a group like Floor, or the pummeling drums of Swing Kids. Yet the environment that spawned them is utterly foreign to most of us.
Picture it: an authoritarian state further hamstrung by U.S. sanctions, plagued by blackouts and without access to reliable internet. A population cut off from the international financial system. A culture in which music circulates via “el paquete semanal”—a clandestine network of digital media distributed on hard drive, delivered door to door—or, in recent years, Telegram groups that have sprung up around the country. Now try to wrap your head around being in a band like Land Whales—the kind of effort it must have taken to access influences that most of us take for granted, much less the gear to make their music with. Asked about Cuba's post-punk scene, Schellekens—now in the Netherlands—replied, “In Cuba, it was very difficult to have access to this kind of music, so it was difficult for anyone even to know what post-punk or noise is, simply because that music never made it into the country.”
Land Whales have been active since 2022, and curiously, their early work sounds smoother and more polished than their new album, evoking classic shoegaze at its most blissed out, along with the sugary psych rock of Dinosaur Jr. (Most of their discography is available on YouTube.) How to Make a Breakfast is rawer, noisier, and more unkempt, which is also to say that it’s more thrilling.
The album opens with droning, distorted guitars, a funereal chug enlivened by unexpectedly gargantuan drums. The lyrics, sung in a pinched and earnest alto, sketch out an unambiguous picture of feeling trapped and needing to run, pinned “between the sword and the wall.” “The Trial” is a screamo take on Franz Kafka—“Guilty before the law!” Schellekens shrieks—set to a hurricane of layered guitars and unhinged drumming. But this is as overtly political as Land Whales get. For the most part, they express themselves not with agitprop, but via the sheer force of their playing.
To play loud or messily is as old as garage rock, but Land Whales tap into a sophisticated kind of chaos, slipping effortlessly between tumbling punk rave-ups, gnarly explosions of feedback, honeyed choruses, and rhythms like a runaway train. They recorded the album at home on a PC; the drums are programmed, though they don’t sound like it. Land Whales sing more often than they shout, evincing a melodic sensibility informed by classic shoegaze. There’s a time-capsule quality to many of these songs; they feel like they could be demos of some forgotten band from the 1990s. But the album never feels expressly retro—Land Whales have too much character, and too many idiosyncrasies, to be mistaken for pastiche.
A week after recording the album—a process interrupted by rolling blackouts—Schellekens left Cuba for the Netherlands. It seems likely that will be the end of Land Whales. In an interview, Buh Records’ Luis Alvarado asked Schellekens about the group’s Cuban post-punk predecessors. “There are antecedents,” replied Schellekens, “but they never managed to make anything.” All recorded traces of those previous groups—bands like Golden Popeye Theory, Mataflores, and el Llanto de Olivia—are “pure lost media,” he says. We should feel grateful that Land Whales haven’t met the same fate. How to Make a Breakfast is an energizing rock record and a winningly affectionate homage to its influences. More than that, it is an important document from a precarious moment in Cuba’s history.
