If with “Nunatak and Wild Flowers” (Warner, 19) the band from Cartagena was already beginning to show clear signs of wanting to start providing their sound with a certain dose of maturity that would free them from the most primary and basic archetypes of hometown indie, through a pandemic and the celebration in the air of their tenth anniversary as a formation, confirm their firm convictions to continue with what was planned, as revealed by the nine cuts belonging to “Nunatak and The Invisible Island”his fifth studio album and a particular departure from the mainstream with which Adrián Gutiérrez, Gonzalo Ruiz, Fernando Besada, Álex Dumdaca and Pedro Hernández team up with the great and prolific Paco Loco to give us their personal sample of wanting to keep trying, at least , another decade.
The undeniable proof of this is a work loaded with positivism and luminosity in abundance that hits us from its first act; a brave gesture in these times and that the listener will undoubtedly appreciate like spring water, for the same reasons. “Get up and get out of here, you don’t deserve my time / Rest and stop pretending, today I want to be honest”, they sing in “Cierra al salir”, a proclamation clearly intended to empower us and invite us to slam the entrenched past that does not allow us to move forward. Because if something operates as a common thread throughout the different pieces that make up this work, it is the incessant intention of the band to fill our spirit and infect us with the certainty of being able to move mountains, whether it be wasting electricity with a clean guitar blast (“I accept the challenge”) or shouting at each other between choirs of winter and emotional folk, with which we are very clear that they will make our hair stand on end in their respective live transfers (“I keep running”).
In the same narrative line, but offering a completely unexpected swerve in his record, we come across that kind of robotic diatribe that is “I deserve it”, where just making use of a treated voice and an atmospheric and enveloping synth, Adri puts himself in the shoes of a guru of the current social media, giving us a particular shot of acid irony and the desire to remind us of the toxicity that is hidden behind these new digital tools: “I am the cattle herder, the mirror they long to look at / stay by my side, in this eternal puberty / I am going to miss the moment, record it in 4k / long live entrepreneurship and postmodernity”. But despite this face, partially casual and predisposed to transmit encouragement to us, the boys of Sealed they also know how to get serious and intense, as highlighted in the dark and intimate textures of “slow and dirty” that progressively conform to each other, to go from a mere story of manners to an explosive bomb of sensuality and distortion. Nostalgia, the great evil of our time, will also have its particular space on the album, and more on the lips of those who have recently completed their respective first ten years as a band; however, that natural and honest way with which Sealed play with the passage of time (“Blow out the sails and accept that everything is going to change / If it’s worth it, wake up and start rowing.”they sing between funky plucks in “Blow the candles”) assures us that his melancholy is neither childish nor false, but rather the fuel required to pick up a run and move forward without looking back.