Almost completely aware that 2023 was not going to be just any year for them (for some reason it marked the tenth anniversary of their eponymous full-length debut), Tom Quintans and their boys have wanted to rebel against what would have been expected from their usual sound and have formalized their most risky and heterogeneous bet to date with “Let’s Destroy”a hymn to catharsis and creative freedom that partially breaks with the models established so far in the imagination of Baby Beast and with which the band now offers us its most brave and carefree version with heavy rock, pop psychedelia and even metal nods.
Tied to the chains of independent pop for four albums, the natural formation from the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Boedo has seen in its fifth album the perfect opportunity to skip the axis and continue exploring in greater depth the vestiges of certain past references that until now only They had been dimly intuited through brushstrokes distributed within their discography. With this premise in front of us, we come across an album that welcomes us with a cover that could even work for a power-metal group from the nineties, this being the prelude to a songbook that, while respecting the original formulas of the quartet , accelerates its cadences until it reminds us (from a distance and in homage) of those guitar lines and those wild double bass drum games, typical of certain iconic bands belonging to the heavy genre (“El Verano”).
In the same vein, we also see the Argentine band leaving crumbs of disappointed nostalgia, reminding us that time gives rise to reflections and conclusions in its wake that years ago were only fallow (“A thousand problems, a thousand mistakes / I always listen to the same songs” , they recite in the aforementioned opening cut). Consequently, and from the euphoria and solidity that comes from knowing that they are together, we see them walking with conscious melancholy through memories that directly allude to a certain roots (intuited among the rugged space rock rhythms of “Candrejal”) or to specific moments of the psyche. that become collective thanks to the universality of their hope and innate light (“A special future that can scare you is already coming,” they sing in the exciting “Un Gran Día”).
An album constantly conjugated in the past (“I will not forget that I touched the sky in Montevideo, I was finally happy”), anchored in chimeras and reminiscences that avoid the path of fiction and reality, and that end up spawning in tracks of disparate cuts (from the contemplative and lysergic “El Humo Negro” to the spiteful romanticism of “La Trafic”) that find their connection and communion in the band’s purpose to give free rein and fluidity to their renewed style from the exemption of boundaries. Thus, and after a flirtation with less hostile nostalgia, they continue with their game of contrasts and bet in “Rock and roll went out of fashion” for irony and for laughing both at themselves and at those who advocate issuing this type of speeches completely convinced (“Everyone went crazy like you with that tropical rhythm that came to destroy us”), showing us with their lyrics that Quintans and his people know how to age with pleasure.
A title like “Let’s Destroy” It could trigger many readings, and even more so if we consider the present moment that his native Argentina is going through; However, what Beast Baby show us with their album and the nine songs that comprise it is their desire to turn this moment into a turning point for the band and thus lay the foundations for a new stage of artistic maturity that begins here and now. “Straight to the museum with the dinosaurs”, yes, but through the front door of current Latin American rock.