The talk with Jorge Mills, alma mater of Auto Sacramental, begins with references to the Valencian DANA and that feeling of dystopia and fragility aroused by the media carousel of its images. It is the confirmation of a new crisis that, more than an opportunity, results in an examination of human behavior in a sample of its benefits but also its miseries. Plague Diary (Ferror Records, 2024), the second album by this Madrid native based in Santiago de Compostela, exudes sinister post-punk twists also caused by another crisis. In this case, humanist.
“They thought they were free and no one will be free as long as there are plagues,” said Albert Camus in his novel, The Plague (1947), plot from which Mills conceptually starts, although in the choice of title he seems to have crossed over to another great reference, Plague Year Diary (1722) by Daniel Dafoe. “Plague Diary It is inspired by Camus’s philosophical notion about the plague, used as a metaphor to talk about a plague of hatred, mistrust and resentment that is spreading among humanity. He wrote it at the time of World War II and it has a lot to do with Nazism and its advance through France. It is impossible not to draw parallels with what is happening today, this new rise of the right and how it affects each one of us,” he asserts.
Mills, who in his debut Question of Faith (Miranda The Agency, 2021) flirted with irony, activating the most colorful and lively gear of synth-pop, now transmutes into a serious, dark tone, with sharp sounds that go from post-punk to darkwave, cwith Joy Division in the center but hosting peripheral branches of New Order, The Cure and Bauhaus. “So [con Cuestión de Fe] My body asked me for something more ironic and fun about rancid Spain. More colorful, quite festive music. Guille Mostaza is very synth-pop, that’s why I worked with him on production. And it was during the pandemic, while I was rereading Camus, that I started making songs and I said to myself, ‘come on, I’m going to do something more personal and stop hiding behind irony.’ In this way I have had to be more sincere and direct and delve into uncomfortable feelings that were arising.”
This Gothic turn is inherent to a synchronous process that has matured since the pandemic. “Times suddenly changed a lot. 2020 changed everything. And this new configuration of reality asked me for something darker, in addition to the fact that when performing the songs live I lacked intensity on stage,” he says. This sinister inflection, unrelated to capricious fashions, connects with the idiosyncrasy of the first post-punk wave, with which Mills identifies: “At the beginning of the 80s the idea was to seek artistic authenticity, whether self-managed or with independent record labels and if They were doing something dark because their lyrics really were dark and they were going through a moment like that. Now dark music, like darkwave, is very trendy again, which is great. What happens is that many times it is simply an aesthetic, a posture and they have hedonistic lyrics or about doing more banal things, which is also fine, but I was more interested in the other thing.”
“Plague Diary It is dark because it deals with a systemic darkness, understood as that resentment or distrust that we have towards each other and that is now greatly amplified,” Mills rounds out about the narrative pillar on which his new album is based. It is, therefore, a structural lament that, as stated in the song that serves as the title –accompanied in this case by Álvaro de Biznaga–, could be summarized in “Bread, circuses and cruelty”. But always from an intimate perspective, never as an explicit complaint. “Plague Diary It refers to social networks, where all our shame remains. All our hate. It’s cruelty and circus. It’s all show. Self-promotion, selling out, hating and belittling others. And then I think about how it makes me feel. That would be the difference between what I do and what Biznaga does, for example. “They would denounce the fact itself, and I reflect on what it provokes in me.”
‘Plague Diary’ refers to social networks, where all our shame remains. All our hate. It’s cruelty and circus. It’s all show. Self-promotion, selling out, hating and belittling others
Jorge Mills
— Auto Sacramental Leader
The conversation drags on at this point. The massive migration of profiles from “If you use them you become a product. I don’t mind selling my band or my musical project as a product, because in the end, it is a product. And, the truth is, without networks you can’t give a concert. But since I don’t have personal social networks, what am I going to think about X, then you all go away.”
A glimmer of light among the darkness
Despite the tone between regretful and dystopian, with frequent references to the twisted religious imagination, there is in Plague Diary a glimmer of future light that, among darkness, illuminates topics such as Grief, Requiem either New dawn. Anointed in more pop oils, they slip in vague ideas about fraternity, friendship or love and appeal to a corporeal connection, far from all virtuality. “Not everything is darkness, of course. There is hope,” explains Mills. “There is humanism because there is still faith in human beings. Furthermore, almost all the lyrics are addressed to another person, there is an interlocutor.”
This is how Jorge Mills dresses his project in changeable clothes. If yesterday it was irony and today it was darkness, tomorrow the varnish may be different. “Probably the next album will be bright and happy” –he confesses– “Like Echo & The Bunnymen or The Feelies, which are groups that I love and are also post-punk, but a little more new wavemore colorful and cheerful. But now I wasn’t in that moodthat has to come out.”
Yeah Question of Faith was produced at Guille Mostaza’s Alamo Shock studios, for Plague DiaryMills has opted for Metropol. “I wanted to work with Adolfo [Parraga] and with Fran [Meneses] We have been colleagues for more than 10 years, and to do something less indie and more intense, more hardcore, without reaching punk either. Keeping the synths, the melodies, but more powerful. And I recorded it in installments, on different visits I made to Madrid to see my family who still lives there.” This recent move to Santiago de Compostela has forced him to also reconfigure his live band. Many changes. All conveniently spaced. “The two albums came out three years apart. “Then it gives you time to change,” says the Madrid native about that artistic approach affiliated with piano, piano if you arrive lontano: “As I am doing things little by little, the evolution may also become more noticeable.”
This light mentality, which dispenses with pressure and objectives, is the privilege of those who do not live – nor seem to intend to – from music. Mills is moved by purely artistic, creative but also recreational aspirations, and that puts him in an enviable position of libero: “Steve Albini said that asking art to generate benefits and that if not, it is not valid, it is like thinking that love or friendship are worthless if they do not bring you a material benefit. Music doesn’t always have to be linked to money. Let’s see, I can defend this from a privileged position because I have another job. But it is true that in previous decades it was more fashionable to be anti-commercial, to be underground either indie just because and make music without thinking about success. This today is practically banished from the discourse of many artists. I think it’s social media’s fault, again.”
In previous decades it was more fashionable to be anti-commercial, to be underground or indie just because and to make music without thinking about success. This today is practically banished from the discourse of many artists. I think it’s social media’s fault, again.
Jorge Mills
— Auto Sacramental Leader
“There was a legendary punk group from the 70s, the Californians The Germs, who had a song, What We Do Is Secret (What we do is secret), in which they were proud that what they did was not understood by people and was a minority. When I started making music in the 2010s, that spirit still lived on. In any case, there is no need to be innocent either. I mean that, obviously, you don’t have to work for free because it is still a job. And if there is money, it is welcome, because we live in a material and materialistic world,” he concludes.
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