When Malcría scrawled “What the fuck do you want?” in Spanish across an early EP, the title was less an insult than an invitation: They raised the question with the goal of kindling listeners’ determination. Malcría come from a long line of hardcore bands that find bottomless energy within their anger, and since breaking onto Mexico City’s scene in 2014, the trio has scoffed and stomped and screamed in pursuit of a better world. Lately, their anger spawns from the recognition that the future their generation was promised no longer exists.
On Fantasías Histéricas, their second album, Malcría try to imagine a reality where misery and paranoia can be escaped, but they find the task impossible. Singer-bassist Baldo Crudo, guitarist Alan Di González, and singer-drummer GG Androide drop right in on opener “Una Vez Más,” warning that decadence and blind devotion have led us astray. A flurry of D-beat drumming and Crudo’s yelped vocals morph through tempo change-ups, a hair metal guitar solo, and excerpts from the Spanish dub of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. On “El Monumento,” Androide admits his fight against the status quo is in vain: He’s growing older and more fragile each day, just like everyone else. By the time he acknowledges there’s a limit to his romanticism on “Utopía y Fracaso”—“No tiene caso imaginar una sociedad donde no haya mal/El mundo ideal es irreal” (“There’s no point in imagining a society where there is no evil/The ideal world is unreal”)—he’s already scratched his throat trying to scream it into existence.
Malcría write their lyrics as a group, and Crudo and Androide take turns singing them. Throughout Fantasías Histéricas, their voices stab each word with the rhythmic motion of a tattoo machine. The two spit out warnings and twist vowels with a similarly charred tone; panic and fear have a way of reducing us to equals. The dynamic interplay between their ever-so-slightly different vocals only adds to the album’s disorienting rush. While they don’t adhere to nihilism per se, Malcría find little comfort in ideas like personal liberty or even work-life balance. If you don’t ignore these sources of false hope, the band warns, you’ll get sucked into a black hole. “Toda fantasía tiene su precio” (“Every fantasy has its price”), Crudo reminds on the title track, as Di González shreds with thunderous volume and the muddy, crunchy distortion of grunge. On closer “Todo Es Aquí,” Malcría barrel over the finish line with synchronized riffs that sound like Rudimentary Peni overlaid with Poison Idea. At a whopping three minutes, it’s by far the longest song on the record.
