That the Galician quartet Bizarre Love Triangle It is the formation with the most brilliant indie trajectory in these last twenty years, it is a more than verified fact thanks to recording summits such as “Mystic Victory” (13), “Bizarre Love Triangle” (2020) and now “SED” (Mushroom Pillow, 23), the most difficult yet.
“SED” it is a work that appeals to the unconscious ambition of timeless classics. A collection of songs forged in a latent state of limitless inspiration and the (re) confirmation of the permanent state of grace in which Galicians live. About this and what this album means in his career, we spoke with Rodrigo and Rafael Mallo via streaming from their headquarters in Boiro.
First of all, why “SED” and how conceptual is this album?
(Rodrigo) I think it’s a bit like very primitive human emotions. A very visceral, emotional album. It is something that represents the desire for the power of money, fame, recognition. We wanted to take it out there a bit. In the end, I wouldn’t dare to say that it is a conceptual LP. The other albums are more of a band, with many ideas. In this case, we wanted to make an album with the clearest ideas and, from there, explore them. These are basic feelings that do not need to be explained. In the end, it’s a record that comes from where we all come from, with all the stuff about the pandemic. When we started making the songs, we wanted to do something more concrete. Our previous album or “Salve discordia” are more related. And this is like a reboot, kind of focused on the season of paranoia that we came from. It’s an oppressive record. We also didn’t think much about it, nor did we want to conceptualize it, due to the fact that we are facing being a band that has been doing indie rock for fifteen years, or whatever people think about what that is now, in 2023. We have already passed what is our time several times , several generations. We wanted to face that a bit, what happens when you’ve been doing rock for so many years. Something is left? Nothing remains?
“We didn’t want to make music that was totally out of line with what we do”
I am very interested in what you say about oppression. Your previous LP seemed to take you towards a more spacious, electronic, even industrial or dub dimension. However, in “SED”, except for a few moments, it seems that you reject this path and opt for one of your most organic and raw works, at the same time. But how is the moment when you start to start a new album?
(Rodrigo) That’s something we’ve always done like this. Our big leap was from the first to the second record. Then there is a line with “Victoria Mística”. And that line is that of the following albums: our ideal visualization of what TAB was. Yes, we already made those three albums in that vein, but now the circumstances are very determined and it’s something we wanted to take advantage of. It is not a song to the love of our adolescence, nor is it an album separated from what surrounds us. For example, on our previous album we started to experiment a lot on the electronic side. Yes, it’s true that, initially, the approach of this album was going to go more that way, along the lines of “Fukushima” and all that. In fact, that’s where the first song came from, the most pop on the album. But, from there, we run into a question. In fact, that song mutated a lot, since it began with a computer for sequencing and this kind of gizmos. But, after months, we saw that the computer thing was a drag. A fucking cunt.
We knew that, in songs like the first one, we had to transfer the electronic elements to instruments played in a band format. The sound is not the same. We didn’t want to make music that was totally out of line with what we do. We didn’t want to get into the library music scene.
Speaking of “Lone Star”.
(Rodrigo) It’s one of the songs I like the most out of all the ones we’ve ever done. And it’s a radical break with the rest of the album and with what people think of us. But it does relate us to the hidden narrative of the album, which speaks of a kind of music star, of his desire to succeed, of really wondering what it is for, of recognition. All those kinds of things that we also consider ourselves. In this sense, all this helped us to move from the electronic stuff and to present a record with a theme from a record that really doesn’t follow the line of this song.
This is the starting point of a record that speaks of very atavistic emotions, of things that we are and that we can be.
The clash between the New Order-style techno-pop pulse of “Estrella Solitaria” and the almost Black Sabbath-like sound of the album’s second track: “Buy a yacht” is very striking. How do two songs so antithetical in style emerge?
Rafael: Yes, on other occasions it was like looking for more holes to cover on the album, but here it was not like that.
(Rodrigo) Here the common thread is in the lyrics themselves and in the timbre of the voices. We are looking for a more pronounced variety, but the change itself is already noticeable from our own studio, we recorded it here. We did something we haven’t done since “Holy Year”, which is not to make layouts. Normally, you enter a studio with some demos that you have to reproduce. For this occasion, we decided to end this process, and make a lot of songs. For “SED”, we put together thirty songs, not all of them finished. We wanted there to be a lot of musical ideas, but the overall idea of the storytelling to be more monolithic. And from there, we extracted the disk. It’s a different process because on the other albums you think about the songs based on the ones you already have. Normally, we are stopped for six and eight months to compose and then we go on tour. But with the pandemic everything came together. And that allowed us to keep the material we were composing fresh. It often happens that when you go to a studio and have a few days to record, you don’t mess around. And in this one, having much more time to record, we were able to do it with much rawer songs. We got to see how far each song can take you. You kill the process of repeating and remembering. And then things start to come out. For example, there are a couple of songs on the record that were completed at the same time it was being recorded. That for me is a luxury because I think it’s the ideal way to make records. The distribution of work is elsewhere.
Rafael: I think we focused our creativity on the recording, which allowed us to look for new things. Not so much in the previous phase. Here you could arrive, try your things, have your time to develop it a little more. This is something that you can’t do in a studio where you are constantly looking at the time.
“I am very disconnected from musical news because it changes before it can be interesting”
Totally, and more so at a time when productions are more focused on how songs sound on digital platforms, on mobile phones.
(Rodrigo) If in the end we are going to become content creators (laughs). Continuously throwing content into a black hole. It does not matter, with which it is consumed. Music has to be personal.
After having published another work as ambitious as this one, is the artist aware of the value of what he has done? Do you never feel the pressure of “even more difficult” and the fear of lowering the tension in the face of the shadow of the precedent and the flood of positive criticism?
(Rodrigo) We are here, in Boiro. The album has been out since February, but with all this waiting around for vinyl, etc… It’s not like many people have listened to the album. We have no idea of the perception people are having of the record. In the end, it is a huge job. We are a band that tends to do everything in a more artisan way, to control everything more from within. In addition, Carlos Cuevas recorded the album in our own house. For us it is like a dream come true. The whole process is done here. We set up the studio with the help of Carlos, with his specifications.
For us making a record is as if we hadn’t made others before. Obviously, you apply everything you learn. I love all our records. Let’s see, I hear my voice from twenty years ago, and…. (laughs). But on all the albums he was always crazy, he never put the bus under the goal. All the decisions were in accordance with what we believe the song asks for and to reach the maximum. And with this one, the same.
How do you deal with being considered the standard bearers of underground pop in the era of generation Z, bedroom pop or trap, where the indie of the nineties and the 2000s is almost seen as something outdated?
(Rodrigo) It’s like fighting against homogeneity. Even if the space is smaller or larger, you have to do like Iron Maiden. If you have your move, that gives you more weight than anything else. Eventually it will reach a point where you will lose your essence. I am very disconnected from musical news because it changes before it can be interesting. It’s like genre demos, but when it starts to boil and generate more chaotic things, they’re on to something else. It’s like we’re always on the reset.