It would be too glib to say “Chileans are emos,” but it ain’t wrong. Chile’s current post-hardcore explosion—the nueva escena chilena—exists in direct conversation with Brazil’s flourishing leftist metal underground. Though its roots stretch back to the mid-2010s, the scene took an evolutionary leap after the COVID-19 pandemic. Estoy Bien’s deeply sad boy Apoyo emocional and Hesse Kassel’s attempt at becoming South America’s answer to Black Country, New Road, both garnered online buzz. Most important was asia menor’s 2023 debut Enola Gay, a frenetic and bafflingly catchy blast of math-pop.
Just this year, we’ve seen the release of the collective (and cheekily titled) Latinameric anfútbol and a wonderful split between La Estrategia del Caracol and Cámara Chilena de la Destrucción, representing the scene’s two poles: Chile’s capital Santiago and arts hub Temuco, the latter a Chilean version of Urbana/Champaign, Illinois. Santiago leftist outfit teodioteodio is one of the first bands reacting directly to democratic backsliding in their country, fusing emo’s ever-evolving influence on Chilean music with spoken-word, poetry, and a syllabus’s worth of South American politics.
Plenty of these releases came in the fragile optimism that followed both COVID and Chile’s 2022 election, where the country voted for its youngest-ever president, Gabriel Boric. He became famous to some for wearing Deftones shirts in government buildings. Depending on who you ask, Boric either failed to deliver on his promises or found himself hamstrung by capitalist powerbrokers. José Antonio Kast was elected last year, leading the country’s first right-wing government since the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. teodioteodio, on Echaremos el Cielo Abajo a Patadas, meet the moment with a mixture of ragged hope and despondency.
The Savage Detectives writer Roberto Bolaño is quoted in “Lejos de Mexico.” His story—as a Chilean exile who witnessed the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government—lies at the heart of teodioteodio’s rage. “Lejos de Mexico” is led by beautifully androgynous vocals singing “Si alguna vez”—“if ever…perhaps…”—flooding the record with uncertain hope. But things quickly curdle. “Pantera” has flashes of ecological horror: “your tongue is a drill / in this sea of oil,” vocalist Diego Álvarez shouts. “Pantera,” as the name suggests, is the most metallic song on the album, guitars down-tuned, bass growling and churning below. At times, Álvarez’s screams fuse with squalls of guitar feedback, the sounds impossible to separate. In the midst of the howls, the band sings “¿Qué hacemos ahora? Dime.” What do we do now? Tell me.
On album centerpiece “Catástrofe,” Álvarez hollers, “The world ended yesterday / And you didn’t even notice,” a righteous call to shrug off apathy. “Catástrofe” and “Lejos de Mexico” owe the most to post-hardcore and math rock legends. “Lejos de Mexico” is driven by a slippery, unsettling drum line straight out of the toe playbook, while “Catástrofe”’s opening riff calls to mind At the Drive-In’s early, rattling fury. The opening three tracks, all stretching beyond five minutes, function as suites, stitching together disparate sections and thrilling riffs that eventually crash like an avalanche. “Catástrofe” might boast the year’s best riff, an angular, supremely catchy line that Origami Angel would’ve killed for. “Lejos de Mexico” and “Pantera”’s darker moments pilfer from Damián Antón Ojeda’s (Sadness, letterstoyou, Trhä) ever-expanding universe, using melody as a weapon in the midst of grit and pain.
The second half of the album is darker and more dour, revealing Echaremos el Cielo Abajo a Patadas’s main weakness: plenty of political spoken-word records mistake conviction for momentum. The album’s first three songs brilliantly capture a political sentiment while amplifying the power of Álvarez’s revolutionary screeds, but the ten-minute-long “Puente” and the dizzyingly long “Multitudes” stumble over their own intent with long, droning sections that feel like aborted Godspeed You! Black Emperor tunes. And Álvarez speaks like he’s grabbed the listener by the lapels in an attempt to shake them out of a stupor. Both could have been cut down by at least a few minutes. The tension ratchets up too far, and by the time the songs explode, it feels exhausting rather than cathartic.
The back half of Echaremos el Cielo Abajo a Patadas also holds the album’s most fascinating song: “Amar,” which starts in beat poetry mode, listing off verbs in an ASMR tone, all of it disquieting and threatening. When the song finally rips itself apart, it sounds like Rites of Spring invading a jazz club, a smoky lead singer still emoting as the stage catches fire. It implies more songs along the same lines as Mamaleek’s regret-filled world, where jazz and punk hold the same morbid fate. Álvarez’s first words on the album are “we all deserve to be saved.” This budding, bustling Chilean scene is one of the most exciting in the world right now, and teodioteodio has the potential to be in the vanguard of the experimental and the heavy. But at its core, their hope and rage come from one basic tenet: a demand for dignity. [Self-Released]
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.
