Pictured: Shego is a Madrid-based dulce punk band
It’s a sad-but-true fact that by far most Americans are monolingual pendejos—and I hasten to add this applies to yours truly too cuz those two years of college Fraunch stuck about as well as frog legs to a Mack truck’s tires—and this in a country where almost 20% of the population is Hispanic and/or Latin American (almost 30% in NYC!) but lucky for all us gringos you don’t need to know Spanish to groove to all the great Spanish-language music on offer in our fair city with various organizations and events serving as both a guide to cultural outsiders and a haven for Latina/o indie music lovers…
…with indie music broadly defined not only as genres typically covered by this publication, ranging from shoegaze and punk rock to techno and jangle pop and hip hop, but also the many indigenous Hispanic genres that likewise exist in the independent and underground realms of musical culture ranging from psychedelic cumbia to charango music like for instance the Brooklyn-based pan-Latino band Eclectic Charango Beats who take the plucky Andean lute and spike it with heavy doses of psychedelic headiness and Chicano roots music as on their latest single "Amigo" (feat. Miles Solay), a song that "moves with cumbia and rock and talks about mental health through a metaphor about the violence left by the armed conflict in Colombia"…
…and then there’s the recent U Street Festival held at Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick this past April, hosted by the lovely and talented Ximena Zuluaga, with bands running the gamut from merengue punk (Hecho En Brooklyn) to Latin-Venezuelan fusion (La SaZound) to queer-identified operatic electroclash (Chico Raro) to "new wave meets No Wave" punk rock (Spite Fuxxx) plus many other styles besides with the stated goal of the all-day fest being “to create a crossroad for the spectrum of the people that live in Bushwick today” in response to rapid change and gentrification in the neighborhood (quoting from festival co-organizer Diana Hernandez working alongside Lucho Parra) by bringing together various otherwise Balkanized alternative music scenes in a locale where they already oft-unknowing co-exist…
…with the aforementioned gentrification vividly portrayed by Ridgewood’s own (a Queens neighborhood adjacent to Bushwick) Maria Lina a.k.a. Maria Machete, one of several vocalist/multi-instrumentalists in local punk rock combo Frida Kill, in "Mujeres Con Mangos" from 2022’s EP 1, a song inspired by reports of undocumented workers being arrested for selling churros in NYC and a memory I have of passing by an old family friend Margerita, who sells mangos year round on Knickerbocker Ave., getting ticketed by cops in the bitter freezing cold for selling mangos as described by Maria to Kate Hoos in the music blog Full Time Aesthetic…
…who are but one of the players on in the vibrant Latinx punk scene as witnessed both at the recent annual Latin Punk Fest held at the Windjammer last month in Ridgewood, Queens featuring Sebastian Ortiz, Mau, Wakala, Microprismas, Depression Tropical, and Mal De Ojo, and also at the Abort the System showcase and fundraiser (“fund abortion, not police”) held at Bushwick’s May Day Community Center in March 2023…
…which featured a panoply of international and immigrant punks such as NYC hardcore badasses Kārtël, a band comprised of immigrants from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, and let’s not overlook the local Latin-American metalhead contingent either as represented by Non Residents (“no flags or race / divide our way / no shit to obey / we don’t discriminate”) nor the experimental electronica (Slic), alternative pop (Valley Latini), and hard rockin’ rawk (Joudy) artists relocated to NYC from South America as previously profiled on this blog and of course we’re leaving out many, many others…
…and when it comes to the broad spectrum of indie pop/rock/electronica from the Latin/Hispanic diaspora in New York City there’s a new player in town known as SON Estrella Galicia who made a memorable entrance with their kickoff event at Baby’s All Right a couple weeks back featuring a beer tasting paired with live sets by Brooklyn-by-way-of-Madrid-and-Galicia songstress Marem Ladson (Deli profile coming soon!) and local hypnotic-motorik-psych-rockers GIFT and in case you were wondering son means sound in Spanish and serves as a prefix for various Latin American genres such as son cubano as famously brought to the masses by Buena Vista Social Club back in the late ‘90s…
…while Estrella Galicia refers to a brand of beer from the Galician region of Spain brewed since 1906 by five continuous generations of the Rivera Family with funding from 100% Spanish and independent capital in accordance with the ten principles of the UN Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals but best known to hopheads for their lager made from a mix of blended malts and bittering hops but if you’re looking for something to pair with wild boar or roe deer cooked over deep coals with spices and aromatic herbs garnished with chocolate then allow us to recommend the 1906 Black Coupage which received a gold medal at the World Beer Awards a little while back…
…and yeah you caught us quoting/paraphrasing from the Estrella Galicia press kit but rest assured this ain’t no paid endorsement and when we say the beer is quite good and does the job it’s meant to do it’s not because the Riveras paid for our staff to take a Harlan Crow-style luxury vacation via megayacht across the South Seas tho’ it’d admittedly be hard to turn down such an offer especially with the air in NYC being unsuitable for breathing at the moment (thanks a lot, Canada!) but for now we’re mere unpaid shills and mostly proud of the fact given how most of our staff are Bernie-lovin’ card-carryin’ commie bloggers who regard all forms of mercantile exchange as a filthy sin except for when it comes to drink tickets (they always accept drink tickets) and complimentary finger foods too…
…but I digress from the main point of how SON Estrella Galicia is dedicated to bringing independent music and emerging artists from the Spanish-speaking world and beyond to receptive audiences the world over and thank goodness they’ve made their way to these orange-hued shores cuz it’s high time someone endorsed the pairing of music and beer and introduced us to a bunch of cool new music from the Hispanosphere cuz we’re always up for cool new music, monolinguism be damned, and for expanding the DeliCorp brand in the process…
…which you already know if you’ve been listening to our “Deli Delivers” monthly playlists which routinely feature rock en español from Mexico, South America, and yes even Spain especially in the realms of shoegaze, noise punk, psychedelia, garage rock, grunge, and dreampop that so many Spanish-speaking/bilingual bands seem to have mastered and carried into compelling new directions…
…like for instance artists like Margaritas Podridas (Hermosillo, México), Lorelle Meets The Obsolete (Baja California, México), Sonic Emerson (Ciudad de México), Generacion Suicida (SoCal), The Slashes (SoCal), shego (Madrid), Soleá Morente (Madrid), Sexores (Ciudad de México via Ecuador), El Shirota (Chiluca, México), Silvana Estrada (Veracruz, México), Melenas (Pamplona, Spain) and Cala Vento (alt Empordá) to name but a handful…
…and hey here’s a "Rock En Español” playlist which is a work in progress being unveiled here for the first time for your listening pleasure and personal betterment and hey we haven’t even touched upon many of the many, many other artists of Latinx ancestry that are prominent on the NYC indie scene including Alexandra Blair (The Silk War), Katie Ortiz (Debbie Dopamine, batsbatsbats ghostghostghost), and Sofia Zarzuela who wowed the crowd at the recent Great American Mud Wrestling Show in Bed-Stuy but that’ll have to wait for another time…
…so check it all out if so inclined cuz it’s good for ya to get outside your own hermetically sealed bubble once in a while (if not your hermetically sealed apartment) and there’s a good chance at least some of this music will speak to your heart and soul no matter your native tongue… (Jason Lee)