Holiday in Madrid. 11 in the morning. Five kids rehearse in a place in Ciudad Lineal, their neighborhood. It is a small space where they barely fit. The drummer chugs on a large can of an energy drink and rolls cigarettes. They attack a topic. The singer, arm extended like a preacher, intones: “Comb for my girl and a shawl. / Seat in theater. / The canyon life. His name is canyon life and it is the new anthem of Spanish pop-rock.
Nobody who knows the beats of Spanish music well doubts that Alcalá Norte is going to become a great band. The enthusiasm of the critics, the response of the public, the sales of the vinyl of their first album (already sold out on the third edition), the calls from the festivals to score the goal (Tomavistas, Primavera Sound, BBK Live)… Everything is precipitated per minutes. Literally: in the two hours that the rehearsal lasts, they receive proposals from several festivals that want to hire them. Today, Alcalá Norte is the most talked about Spanish group in the music industry, with followers in their twenties and also older, who long for young bands playing old music. A friend of the group told them that they were a mix between Burning and The Cure, and that’s not a bad definition.
Dealing with a gang just seconds before it explodes is an exciting experience. They conduct themselves at all times in wonderfully naive terms and breathe an emotion of a purity that they will never feel again. The same thing that happened to Nacha Pop in 1979, to Los Planetas in 1993 or to Vetusta Morla in 2007. The year that lit the fuse. “Well, for now we believe that the 170 euros we pay for the rehearsal space we will always be able to finance with what we get from the group,” they say ironically during the morning song test. They share a venue with two bands. Another thing that will possibly end: soon they will have a larger space for themselves to test the songs.
The strengths of this group come from a combination of imagination, intuition, madness and daring. Since the choice of the name, Alcalá Norte, identical to that of the shopping center (located in Ciudad Lineal, a Madrid district in the northeast of the city) where the founders of the group have spent years killing time: Álvaro Rivas (voice), Jaime Barbosa (drums) and Juan Pablo Juliá (guitar), all three 29 years old. “We spent part of our adolescence and youth there. We went to the movies, we had a drink… And there was a really cool rock t-shirt store, where I bought my first Reincidentes sweatshirt. Now the shopping center is in the doldrums, with many stores closed, but it’s still cool.” The speaker is Barbosa, the drummer, curly black hair, elastic pants. He seems ripped from an Iron Maiden concert in 1982 at the Real Madrid Pavilion. Because Barbosa is heavy. Although at the moment he does not leave the rest of the group to him, he trusts that one day he will manage to insert a guitar solo in some Alcalá Norte song.
Here we come to one of the peculiar and key points of this group: it is built in the manner of a Frankenstein that works precisely because the pieces do not complement each other, but fit together in their disorder. The singer (Álvaro), an insurance salesman, is a fan of Décima Víctima and The Stone Roses. The drummer, graphic designer, points out Burning and Los Suaves as his favorite Spanish bands; The other founder, the guitarist (Juan Pablo), who is studying a doctorate in history in Sweden, is drawn to the Argentine rock of Charly García. The three founded the band in 2019 along with other musicians who have gotten off the “dragon”, as Álvaro calls the group. Along the way, three elements have been incorporated, who are not from Ciudad Lineal, and who have contributed technical knowledge, since they have musical studies: the bassist’s favorite artist, whose name is Pablo Prieto (32 years old) and works in a bank, It’s Mike Oldfield; the keyboardist, Laura de Diego (27), a piano teacher, opts for experimental proposals such as that of Marina Herlop; The guitarist, Carlos Elías (36), who goes to his family doctor’s office every morning, chooses Nirvana. They all have occupations with which they earn a living. If things go as industry insiders claim, within a few months they will have parked their current jobs to dedicate themselves exclusively to Alcalá Norte.
The oldest of the band, Carlos Elías, tells how he met the group: “It was 2021 and they were playing in a small room in Madrid, El Sótano. At first, I was surprised that an unknown band was filling up and, furthermore, with very young people. The sound was a mixture of darkness and eighties decadence on which firm bass melodies walked that supported everything, along with synthesizers that coexisted perfectly with guitars, which, although they sounded clean, transmitted aggressiveness. And on top of all that, a singer who took advantage of that sound cushion to keep the public’s attention in the palm of his hand.” After that concert, Elías, a partner in a recording studio, proposed to them to record an album, which is now out of print, and a few months ago he joined as a guitarist. Elías has channeled the band’s talent and energy to achieve professionalism.
Days after the rehearsal, the singer and author of the lyrics, Álvaro Rivas, receives us at his house. It is the family apartment, in Ciudad Lineal, where he grew up, about 60 square meters, which his father has now rented to him. Rivas lives with his wife, whom he married four years ago. He represents the creative source of the group, with lyrics that talk about mythological gods, about boys who die in a fire after a drug-dealing accident, about a self-conscious Goebbels, about having a small apartment on Elfo Street (also in Ciudad Lineal). … The lyricist, who claims a fast reading ability, consumes classical philosophy, Goethe, Léon Bloy, Calvino, Enrique Ocaña, Chaves Nogales, Ernst Jünger… he misses the Madrid of Cristiano Ronaldo, he draws on interviews offered by Pasolini, he claims the green Power Ranger… He mixes classic history, scholarship and popular culture in his texts. The canyon life, For example, it emerged after Barbossa (the generator of ideas and phrases between traditional and ingenious, as well as a fan of the series Tell me: has seen it in its entirety eleven times) read in a 1935 issue of the magazine Graphic world the aspirations of a resident of Lavapiés after being hit with the Fat. “What are you going to do with the money,” they asked him. “Strike my life, cannon,” the winner responded eloquently.
Rivas sings with a Madrid street cockiness typical of Toño Martín (the great vocalist of Burning) or Ramoncín. He loves Joy Division and The Stone Roses and had his “stage bakaluti.” You can see hints of everything in Alcalá Norte. Next, the singer himself defines his 29 years in a few seconds with an amazing ease and capacity for synthesis: “As a child he loved reading a lot. At eight years old he had already read me The Lord of the rings. She wrote stories and bound them. But then the Game Boy and the Play Station arrived and that slowed down my reading rate. It killed me creatively. In fact, my father and my uncle, who was the one who encouraged me to paint, sadly remember how I disengaged from creation to devote myself to consoles. And then, at 16, alcohol arrived and I stopped reading for good. At 22 I indulged in alcohol and embraced a messiah who passed by my side, who was Antonio Escohotado, who gave me back my passion for studying. And from then until I fell into the joints I read a lot. Daughters of that stage are the lyrics of the album. “Now I’ve put down the joints and started reading again.” This means that the songs from the second album are currently taking shape.
The use of the keyboard combined with an eighties look is reminiscent of Permanent Paralysis. The keyboardist, Laura de Diego, displaying blessed candor, claims to be unaware of Eduardo Benavente’s group and has no news about Ana Curra. De Diego was first a follower of the group and then a member. “When I followed them I liked the imagination they have when choosing topics for lyrics and creating fun micro-universes that are related. And then the theatricality of the live shows, with ham raffles, costumes, poetry readings… It’s different from what you see in other bands.”
Alcalá Norte has not signed any type of contract. “We trust the manager and the record company [independiente], and they trust us. There will be time for bureaucracy,” they point out. The singer defines the current situation in Alcalá Norte as “a creature with a life of its own, a dragon on whose back we are riding.” And he explains his main concern: “What worries me most is my home, how this hustle and bustle can affect my relationship with my wife. And I’m worried about my non-musical career: what will become of it. Those are the doubts I have. I want to continue working as an insurance salesman, but will my performance suffer because on Mondays I arrive exhausted after a weekend of concerts?” Side effects of cannon life.
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