I don’t know if there is a band anywhere that has me as excited as Space Monkey Mafia right now. This is their third single in the last 6-7 months, all three of them sound incredibly different from each other, with completely different influences, and all three and 100% undisputed certified bangers. Seriously, these tracks are insane, and they teased that the last two were off an upcoming album, although there is still no date or name for the album announced yet. I asked about how all three songs sound so different and discovered that each single was written by a different member of the band, with Joe writing “Linear Time”, Blake writing “Death of the Party”, and now “Malas Raíces” being written by Dante.
Apparently, Space Monkey Mafia took all of the best songwriters and put them in one band and didn’t share them with the rest of the world.
The song starts off with, what feels like a Latin ska beat and what reminds me of a Sanata-esque guitar, before a slow, melodic first verse that feels like it was co-written by the Pomps (and I mean that as complimentary humanly as possible because the Pomps write amazing songs). The verse is about a neighborhood being judged by investment capitalists for its potential financial windfalls- “potential” to make money and to raise costs. The song feels seductive, but there is a cold, harsh criticism underlying every line, and the delivery is beautiful.
The chorus comes on hard and fast, switching to heavy punk rock- “Don’t try and build me up, and then commodify my love…” The horns in the transition to the second verse are stellar, the transition in style of the second verse is quick, flowing expertly as the song becomes a full-fledged aggressive ska-punk track before the chorus repeats, and slows the pace back down to the level of the previous chorus. It all works together to deliver a powerful fresh criticism of gentrification and investment real estate that has never felt this personal and beautiful before. The third verse is back to the slower melodic rhythms from the intro and brings back that sexy guitar work, and more criticism of tax rates being worse for these property speculators than stolen land, with some biting lyrics, but this time, as the verse comes to a close, it doesn’t speed up into the chorus, but into a fast aggressive Spanish language verse that I can’t interpret due to my own incompetence, but holy shit does it still hit hard. In fact, even without knowing a single word in this verse, it’s the most impactful part of the entire song. The song closes with one more chorus, and it has the desired effect. The song manages to capture beauty, love, vitriolic anger, passion, and aggression, all in three short minutes.
I can’t wait for the Space Monkey Mafia album to finally release, whenever it does. All three tracks capture emotions and deal with an impressive range of topics and two of them deal with politics without being too on the nose, but with amazing storytelling. The instrumentation and composition of these songs are phenomenal, and the lyrics are somehow even more powerful. Space Monkey Mafia is quickly becoming one of my favorite bands, and until their album releases, I’ll be listening to these three most recent singles ad nauseum.
Written by Gimp Leg
