Crim, interview in Mondo Sonoro (2023)

the people of tarragona Crim They are road hungry. That is why this month they will go out to present the songs from their new work, “Songs of Death” (HFMN/B-Core, 23), which have already become benchmarks of their own throughout the territory.

After sweeping Barcelona, ​​the quartet will visit Bilbao (March 24, Gaztetxe de Zorroza), San Sebastian (March 25, Doka), Valencia (March 31, Rockcity), Madrid (April 1, Copernicus), Lleida (April 21, Cafè del Teatre ), Salt (April 28, La Mirona) and Tarragona (May 6, Sala Zero).

It’s ten o’clock in the morning and we meet with Crim to chat about your new job, “Songs of Death”. The entire formation begins a marathon of interviews that will last all day. They face it with enthusiasm. I guess it’s the price to pay for playing in the most important punk rock band in Catalan at the moment. But could you imagine that they would arouse so much interest when they began to meet to rehearse in the distant 2011? “Not at all, we set up the band with zero ambition, no expectations. The idea was to meet during the week to play. We come from a world where no one, when they start a band, thinks of sticking their heads out of that corner where you meet up with people you know.”.

“We do not have references, or precursors, but as long as it is credible for us there is no ceiling”

Without inventing anything new, because we are talking about punk rock without strange additives, they found their sound. Or rather, his stamp. “Criminal” punk rock, he had read in the press release. They downplay, also the fact that some bands in Catalonia seem to emulate them. “We also have our influences and perhaps we are a bridge. We didn’t invent anything, we just did it in a language we weren’t used to.”they say. Be that as it may, Crim return to the fray with a new studio work after the highly inspired “Our Father who art in hell” of 2018, a work that appeared in these same pages as the best punk and hardcore album of that year’s vintage. We will see what the next few months bring them, because the bars are there to overcome them and the glass ceilings to burst them. “For us we have already done much more than would be logical [risas]. Everything that comes will be welcome. We do not do things thinking about, for example, filling a Sant Jordi”. But, something a little smaller like a Sant Jordi Club? “I don’t think it will happen, although we also didn’t think we would fill a Razz [risas]. We do not have references, or precursors, but as long as it is credible for us there is no ceiling.

Without setting long-term goals, but also not without limits, Crim They already want to present to the length and breadth of the peninsula and beyond a length that only they know about all the work and above all the sacrifice that it hides. Its composition began in 2019, just before the Covid-19 arrived. We will talk little about those pandemic days of unfortunate memory, but the truth is that the album was “recorded in hiding during the dark era of 2020” on Cal Pau Recordings, as they themselves explain in the album booklet. “Our plan was to release ‘Cançons de Mort’ first and then the tenth anniversary album [el de sus temas en inglés con ilustres invitados e invitadas]but with the pandemic we thought that it did not make any sense to release the new album and it was better to release the anniversary one that did not need a presentation tour ”. The recording was directed by the omnipresent Santi García, with whom they have previously worked and the harmony is absolute. “We have prepared the songs very well, but he gives his opinion and we listen to him if he proposes something to us because he is never wrong. And what’s more, we’re blown away by recording with him, how he works, how he sounds, being with him during the week and a half of recording…” recall some musicians who also have words of gratitude for HFMN, their agency. They grew hand in hand because “Crim was HFMN’s third reference as a label, which initially was a booking agency for foreign bands and a concert promoter.” for the band is “great because it is taking DIY to the maximum power”.

We also talked about the lyrics, one of the strong points of a band with an enormous capacity to create hymns. Each album is well served with memorable phrases, the kind that the public chants live and even endorses. What pressure when facing the blank page! “A bit [risas]. It shouldn’t be like this, in the end they’re just songs, but it’s also true that if we didn’t say anything, we wouldn’t be here.”, sums up his singer and guitarist, Adrià, who arrived at the studio without a single finished letter. He finished them off during the recording, in a dystopian context, and without being a pandemic album, some reflection about it slipped through. “We were at our ‘peak’, we had a lot of shows, at one very cool point, and suddenly everything went to shit. We didn’t want it to be reminiscent of the pandemic, but on a personal level there are antidepressant reflections, self-encouraging. There is no thread but they are part of the same discourse”Add.

I couldn’t say goodbye to them without asking them about the cover, since they repeat the illustrator, Guillem H. Pongiluppi, but this time it’s much darker and above all disturbing. they wanted “a painting, a human still life” and he gave them a gruesome scene, with mutilated bodies and rotten fruit, with four disturbing anthropomorphic animals watching in the background.“Le pedimos a Caravaggio”, loose Adrià, totally serious. And it doesn’t seem silly to me, well, thinking about it “Songs of Death” It is a record born in times of darkness, which recounts the excesses and miseries of the human condition, but at the same time sheds some light in the form of memorable melodies.

Crim concert schedule