Miami’s DIY protagonists Las Nubes will be returning on June 14th with new album, Tormentas Malsanas. Something to whet the appetite before then, Pesada, the third single from their eagerly anticipated long player, is released in a matter of weeks and my goodness it’s a beautifully thunderous thing. It offers, lyrically, a powerful challenge to the nauseating ubiquity of public-facing virtue signalling and performative activism but for a song ostensibly about style over substance, Las Nubes prove they have both in magnificent abundance and use them here to wondrous sonic effect.
Beginning with a languid and sludgy churn of throbbing guitar, it fuzzes and vibrates hypnotically, repeating in tense anticipation of the break that you know will have to come. And oh it most certainly does! With an assault of wild, punk rock drumming, the song is released, unleashing a torrent of enormous, propulsive guitars and the penetrating, cultish, psych vocals of Ale Campos which float over the tightly played madness with pagan intensity.
This song is magnificent! Those chanting, multitracked vocals have an almost ritualistic claustrophobia to them and, lurking in the background, oscillations of feedback undulate within the searing mix adding texture and depth as the song builds unrelentingly to its screaming, echo-laden conclusion. It’s such a collision of disparate influences too- that shouldn’t work but in these hands work brilliantly (anyone who can tie the loose threads of punk and dream pop together is clearly inspired).
In its thrilling four and a bit minutes, Pesada shows itself to be very much its own beast- rule books are thrown aside and a mighty, glorious psych-punk racket is made. It is unequivocally huge and sometimes, and it clearly applies in this instance, big is most certainly better.
And then it’s all over… time to rewind and play it again!
Written by M. A. Welsh