How Spanish duo BALA are tearing up the rulebook.
Spanish firebrands tear up the genre rulebooks
WHILE WE ALL love to hear stories about bands slaving over their art and driving themselves to the brink of madness with endless, Chinese Democracy-style meddling, there’s a lot to be said for grabbing life by the jugular and just getting on with it.
Spanish duo Bala – Violeta Mosquera (vocals, drums) and Anxela Baltar (vocals, guitar) – exemplify this attitude, with their new album Maleza,
a superb slice of all-caps ROCK that combines adrenaline-hit immediacy with crashing riffs and huge, skullinvading hooks.
“Generally when you’re in a band there’s always something you feel you need to rethink or work out, but with Bala, that doesn’t exist,” says Violeta. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not less work,
but it doesn’t need overthinking. I think all the songs we’ve written are recorded and out there; we’re not one of those bands that writes 20 songs and picks eight for the album.”
While their most recent full-length is a testament to their ferocious, espresso-shot-to-the-brain urgency, this energy is also matched by quality songwriting smarts. Stoner, grunge and riot grrrl influences tear through music that sounds timeless and yet startlingly fresh, and the band’s asskicking rage is offset by a scintillating sense of joy.
“Lume, our last album, was an angry one; we were pissed off, and the songs reflect that,” says Violeta. “With Maleza there’s a lot of hope: they’re angry songs, but the message got more positive.”
Bala formed six years ago, but
Violeta and Anxela were on each other’s radars before then; both were active in the Galician music scene and playing in bands that occasionally gigged together. Discovering a mutual love for Black Sabbath, L7 and The
Jesus Lizard made the decision to start their own band a no-brainer, and, tellingly, both women also shared a make-it-happen approach when it comes to playing music.
“From the moment I started playing it was like, ‘Oh, a girl drumming…’,” says Violeta. “I started with the perspective that I had to prove something, but then I thought, ‘OK, I don’t give a fuck, I’m just going to enjoy this.’”
Anxela, too, possessed this same can-do attitude. “When I bought my first electric guitar, I started a band the same day,” she says. “I didn’t know how to play, but I started a band anyway.”
The band’s journey from playing in squats to gigs in Australia (“We played in AC/DC Lane,” beams Violeta), Japan and the California desert (at the suggestion of former Kyuss drummer Brant Bjork, no less) seems meteoric, but Violeta suggests there’s plenty of road yet to travel and that Bala are still experimenting with their sound. The language in which they sing, for example, has switched from English to Spanish for the most part because the duo feel it gives them a deeper connection to their audience, while one of Maleza’s tracks is sung in Galician.
“Galician is kind of a dead language,” explains Violeta. “Young people don’t really speak it, and historically it has been downtrodden because under Franco it was a forbidden language. We use it to value our history.”
One thing the band likely won’t be experimenting with, however, is their pared-down line-up. “We were always clear this was going to be a two-piece band,” says Violeta. “We never think about adding more people. The only con comes down to making decisions; if I say ‘no’ and Anxela says ‘yes’, we have a problem. That’s the biggest pain in the ass.” Logistically, however, it’s a dream and taps nicely into that aforementioned sense of immediacy. “If we need to travel it’s really easy,” says Anxela. “To organise our schedule, our practices, it’s easy. We don’t need anyone else. It’s like, ‘You can? Me too. Let’s do it!’”
Alongside punked-up energy and a seemingly endless supply of vertebrae-jangling riffs, Bala also subtly deal with important themes, ideas and experiences, with songs
dedicated to the flapper girls of the Roaring Twenties, Joan Vollmer (a woman at the heart of the Beat generation who was killed by her husband, William S. Burroughs), and the W.I.T.C.H. feminist movement.
“We’re women in a men’s world and we have a very feminist perspective,” says Violeta. “We talk about the things that bother us, or that we think should be better. I like to be optimistic, and I think things are changing. But there’s a lot of work to do, because most of the bands, festival organisers, sound engineers and promoters are men.
But in the six years we’ve been together I’ve seen a difference – girls come up and tell us, ‘You made me grab a guitar and start playing’, which is super-motivating.”
And what final words of advice would Bala give to this next generation of women following in their footsteps?
“HATERS GONNA HATE, AS TAYLOR SWIFT WOULD SAY”
“The most important thing is keep going and don’t give up,” says Anxela. “Just believe in what you do. Of course you need to have a bit of luck, but I always say luck doesn’t come for free – there’s a lot of hard work behind it.” Her bandmate nods, before signing off with one final thought that neatly encapsulates what Bala is all about: “My advice would be don’t give a fuck about anything anyone tells you,” smiles Violeta. “Haters gonna hate, as Taylor Swift would say, and there’s always gonna be people envying you or trying to put you down so don’t give a fuck. Do your thing and enjoy it, because that’s what life’s about.”
MALEZA IS OUT NOW VIA CENTURY MEDIA