Biznaga: “Music cannot become a fucking marathon for 50,000 people where not even God pays attention”

Álvaro García sings in political imagination: “Can you imagine that another life was possible? That there was an alternative to this drift? What if it were true?” In The enthusiasm: “When disenchantment is tradition, enthusiasm is a dissidence against the submission of the prevailing spirit. A strange flower grows in the gutters.” and in occupy the now: “If yesterday is a debt and tomorrow is an interest rate, let us occupy the time we have left to live in the now.”

Without giving up punk or political influence, something has changed in Biznaga. The anger has subsided, the frustration no longer distills at the bar counter. Nihilism has died and is thus reflected in NOW!, the band’s fifth album that will be released this Friday. Crossed by the social battles of our present – access to housing as a standard, the precariousness of riders or the massive consumption of anxiolytics – the future, for the first time, exists and is not dyed in black.

“Focusing on the current moment as a scenario is exciting, We cannot always blame everything on the past or think that the future does not exist. or it’s scary. We have always been more pessimistic and here there are quietly four or five songs with enthusiasm as the highest flag. We describe the current problem, but we also raise the reasonable doubt of whether this is all we can aspire to or whether we can achieve something better.”

The approach does Jorge Navarrolyricist and bassist of the group, but it is shared by its other three members: Alvaro Garcia (guitar and singer), Milky (battery) and Torete (guitar). Four neighborhood kids, who arrive at this event with a cold triggered after a few days of their own and others’ gigs in London, sitting on the terrace above their rehearsal space in the Madrid neighborhood of Carabanchel that, in the middle of the decline of guitar music, they started doing punk and it’s been going on for ten years. “There have always been bands dealing with street issues, with politics, with what affects us, but never in the mainstream. I don’t know when social and political music was in fashion, but certainly not now.. And the feeling is that fewer and fewer bands talk about it even though there are still many there in the rearguard and in the underground“says Álvaro.

And undergroundthe one with the joints full of people twice their age, where it all began and from which they have been little by little scratching a successful future in what could well function as a metaphor for their current reality. Identical intentions, new ways of facing it. “I understand that people lose their desire for everything, we have also been there and that is why now we have a more positive point. We have been unwilling to change anything because of all the shit that surrounds us, because of a super precarious job, spending the time we had escaping with alcohol and going out. We have sucked too much on that, but you have two options: either send everything to hell, let this go to shit and blow everything up, or focus on changing small things, you don’t need big revolutions,” summarizes the vocalist.

Biznaga has chosen the latter morally, but now also musically. Don’t look, at least for the moment, for his name in macro festivals because you won’t find it. If they want to see them live, beer in hand, they will have to go to one of the dwindling concert halls that still exist throughout the national territory. “In Madrid one closes and you have five or six left, but going around, in Cáceres, Huesca or León, finding one is like cold water. And having them close is a drama because it is the only stronghold for people who like this. At the national level, there is a lack of a solid network of spaces properly equipped for a concert“, assumes Milky.

And Álvaro continues: “It seems that the only way to meet bands is to buy a 300 bucks ticket to a festival and in the end you’re not knowing shit because you’re just looking at a screen. Music cannot become a fucking marathon for 50,000 people where not even God pays attention.. I’m not saying that in a room everyone is quiet, the Spanish public talks a lot, but at festivals the enjoyment leaves much to be desired even for those of us who are playing.”

These four kids set up their band with that sole intention: to enjoy the collective experience, make songs and whatever came, which was nothing other than a musical career anchored to some ideals. Access to housing, now as a priority, to the point of call for mobilization in the protest that will be held in Madrid on October 13 and to which they will not go because of a gig in Barcelona the night before. Because the problem has already reached the rock stars. “If a thousand people who think we have the money to buy a flat give me one euro, they might still help me buy it. We are very far from that,” Milky explains.

And, although politics is a non-negotiable part of this group, enjoyment is still above it. “You have to have a good time, man, there are political bands that are a tremendous bore because they are tacky and pamphleteers. If you are going to make political music, you have an important job so that it does not sound like a tremendously hackneyed, Manichean and simple pamphlet“, Álvaro begins. “We are not Soviet realism, you, here not everything has to contribute to the perpetuation of the revolutionary State. I play songs that talk about banalities, I love them, I enjoy them and I dance to them,” adds Milky. Cierra Jorge: “Another thing is that it is worth taking each song and doing an analysis, which is very much of this time. Every time people mainstream does something that half sounds political, it is oversized, it is said that the degree of intertextuality is incredible and that is fucking marketing. “Enough of playing that game, let’s not waste time oversizing everything.”

Let the music return: “Our future horizon is a wallpaper, the 360 ​​experience of a dissociation.”

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