This Friday, Chilean/Swiss avant noisemakers Muerte Espiral this week will release their debut album, Inframundo, which is composed of eight songs running 36 minutes cast between sludgy heft, heavy rock fluidity, harsher shout-topped noise and grunge. The trio recorded the outing live — which is a neat trick across continents; one assumes somebody traveled — but that was in 2017, so the outing, while a debut, is also somewhat archival. That is not the last seeming contradiction related to Inframundo by any means, but they manage to make it make at least their own kind of sense, and to that, I’ll point out the hand-animated claymation video below for the penultimate track on the record, “Conjuro.”

At 2:46, “Conjuro” is the second-shortest inclusion in Inframundo behind only the album intro “Hipnosis,” and it is by no means a representative sample of the entirety of the album. No single track on it is. From the post-punk-turned-noise-rock-onslaught that is “La Náuseas” through the pairing of “Mantenlo Real” and “Tierra de Nadie” that seem to delight in contrasting aggression and melody in a multi-tiered dynamic between guitarist/vocalist Jurel Sónico, bassist/guitarist Mia Moustache and drummer David Burger, the latter of whom punctuates the doomer thuds of “Mantenlo Real” before winding up and digging back into the pure shove of the verse, opening to a roller nod, and so on through an almost boogie-rock chorus there, because damnit, life is complicated.

“Tierra de Nadie” caps side A with a hook that is quintessential Chilean heavy rock and a lumbering thickness around that moves with deceptive swing around its bombastic ending, and then they’re off immediately on “Cráneo,” the bassline of which reminds of nothing so much as Primus‘ “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver,” at least at the outset before the layered vocal melody of the verse unfolds, the riff semi-progressive in its severity as complemented by toms before turning back around after the hook. They break out a big nod in the second half of “Cráneo” as well, but the context has shifted, and the vocals have somewhat mellowed — Sónico has a high-register bark that reminds my metro-NY ears of some of what Negative Reaction used to get up to — while the guitar in that same second half hints at the meditative vibe of “Conjuro” still to come, but quickly, and on the way to its own ending.

It would be improper to call “El Camino” an outlier, but mostly because the entire album is outliers. It begins with the kind of guitar line that usually means someone in a band likes The Cure — not a complaint — before digging into proggier drumming and a churning build of tension into its first lines, already past two minutes into the total 5:48 by the time it gets there. Like any good book, Inframundo teaches the listener how to read it, and “Mantenlo Real” and “Tierra de Nadie” left clear instructions to watch for big turns in the longer tracks. “El Camino” might not hit six minutes long, but it delivers comeuppance just the same, with half-time cymbal crash behind a precisely-struck slowdown and crescendo, which feels like it might just keep going until it suddenly cuts into “Conjuro”; more than an interlude, a (‘nother) departure in vibe and ready to range as so much of the record to this point has been.

Twisting around the guitar line atop the solid percussive foundation, there’s room to bring it all back around to the hard-hitting pummel and yap, and Muerte Espiral do so in capper “Faz Roída,” growing noisier and grungier until at last the feedback seems to just kind of eat the song. Everything else cuts out and that’s it, but they’ve by then made the nod no less hypnotic than the drone in the album-intro would seem to have intended, and in between the two sides, demonstrated a range and particularly adventurous take on umpteen heavy styles. They don’t make it easy to keep up, necessarily — they’re not out here to be doing favors — Inframundo succeeds because it’s working so pointedly on its own level.

Generally one thinks of a first full-length as a tentative moment for a group. Bands all the time are ‘feeling it out’ on their debut records. And that’s a perfectly reasonable approach, but not necessarily what’s happening here. For sure, Muerte Espiral are exploring a new creative conversation, but there’s nothing tentative about it. They dive in outright and barely come up for air before they’re done. Given that their only other release to-date was 2017’s Invocaci​ó​n EP — apparently a pretty productive year for them between recording and releasing that and recording this — one can’t help but wonder what might be if they’d been pumping out records all the while over the last six years, but new songs or old, Inframundo is able to sound fresh because of its individualized take. They don’t make the rock you expect, and that becomes one of their greatest strengths.

The homemade video for “Conjuro” follows here. Please enjoy:

Muerte Espiral, “Conjuro” video premiere

Mia Moustache on “Conjuro”:

About the Video, it is selfmade DIY by me and Jurel Sonico, the singer and guit player of Muerte Espiral.

It just happened that we did this song and the video for it one day and thought it’s cool, we should show this, haha.

So no special story about it. We both love the desert and know about the crazy and meditative side of life so that’s what we did put in to it via Clay and other little things we found randomly at our homes and used goods stores. It took quite some days to finish it.

Muerte Espiral
INFRAMUNDO
1. Hipnosis 1:10
2. Las Náuseas 3:41
3. Mantenlo Real 6:21
4. Tierra De Nadie 6:10
5. Cráneo 4:22
6. El Camino 5:48
7. Conjuro 2:46
8. Faz Roída 6:13

Recorded live in Switzerland during summer 2017 at BlueShelter Studio.
Recording, Mix & Master by Marc Obrist
Artwork realisation & design by Manuel Guldimann

Bajo & Guit by Mia Moustache
Voz & Guit by Jurel Sónico
Batería by David Burger

Muerte Espiral, Invocación (2017)

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