LP - Gatefold Sleeve - Black Colour Vinyl - Limited Edition **Includes a free digital MP3 download [320 kbps]
PAPA TOPO is back with their long-awaited second album, “Presto y con Toda la Fuerza”. This album is by far their most ambitious and complex work to date. Despite staying true to their exaggerated, melodic, catchy pop, the group is releasing an existentialist album, full of loneliness, unease, and r…
LP - Gatefold Sleeve - Black Colour Vinyl - Limited Edition **Includes a free digital MP3 download [320 kbps]
PAPA TOPO is back with their long-awaited second album, “Presto y con Toda la Fuerza”. This album is by far their most ambitious and complex work to date. Despite staying true to their exaggerated, melodic, catchy pop, the group is releasing an existentialist album, full of loneliness, unease, and rage that comes from contemporary society.
Adrià Arbona has spent the last almost three years writing and arranging and producing this collection of songs, and he did it all with such great passion and attention to detail. After a long period of creative crisis, Adrià decided that, considering what is takes to produce an album, he shouldn’t be shy about it. If art is capable of transmitting messages, you need to use that platform to talk about what you’re really feeling, take a stand and leave the pleasantries behind. So Adrià started a new and fruitful path with the band he had already gotten together with the song “Por España”. In this new stage, without letting go of the more fantastical qualities that have always characterized PAPA TOPO, the political and social activist qualities have become more prominent.
The album title is a quote from one of Joseph Haydn’s tempo and dynamics annotations for the last movement of his piece “The Seven Last Words of Christ”, which was commissioned to be played in the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva church in Cadiz. That movement, called “The Earthquake”, describes in sound how the earth shook and trembled after Christ’s passing, an image that represents this apocalyptic, end-of-days theme so well that it runs through a large part of PAPA TOPO’s new album. “Presto y con Toda la Fuerza” can be understood as a declaration of intentions; it is an album made to shout with rage against a consumeristic society, and to hit our oppressors hard with music, with all of the strength and force possible. The title also works as an indication of tempo and dynamics for the whole album, since, in terms of sound, it is full of thunderous and dizzying tempos.
Musically, the album stands out for the profusion of orchestral arrangements and omnipresence of electronic music. Since the release of “Ópalo Negro” in 2016, Adrià has finished studying composition at the Taller de Músics in Barcelona, where he acquired the necessary technical knowledge about orchestration to be able to write the elegant and complex string and wind arrangements that he had been dreaming of since PAPA TOPO first started. He also started getting into nightclub electro music, expanding the band’s soundscape and creating a personalized ambiance where different influences like classic impressionism, dance music, pop, punk, folklore, cuplé, and atonality all coexist. In between songs, there are interludes with names of baroque dances that give a sense of unity and continuity to the collection of songs and gives the album an air of an old instrumental suite.
The album opens with “Frágil”, a song that mixes impressionistic-tinted orchestral music with drum & bass to talk about something Adrià isreally concerned with: the fragility that living in this exponentially more algorithm-based world causes, with the value of things and people measured by the number of followers or likes. In this digital society, we are more and more slaves to ourselves and we have so much pressure to be constantly promoting ourselves online in order to be successful personally and professionally. This song is inspired by reading Remedios Zafra’s texts and reflections, which resonated really intensely with Adrià, who identified with a lot of the topics the author talked about in her bibliography.
“Dime Mentiras” continues in the same line both lyrically and musically. It narrates the experience of feeling profoundly alone in a time when, despite it being easier than ever to connect with people thanks to social networks, the majority of our relationships wind up being superficial connections. It talks about the desperate search for intimacy and depth in the “meat market”, even if it’s dishonest.
“Ven a mis brazos”, which initially seems like a love song, is really about the constant apocalyptic feeling we have in today’s world. Adrià started writing it on March 14, 2020 (the day before Spanish confinement started) and it is somehow a farewell letter to the world as we know it. The threat of a pandemic, the rise in the far-right, the dawn of AI, the spread of disinformation on social networks and climate change and its catastrophic consequences make it feel like the world as we know it is coming to an end, that the end is near, a paradigm shift is sending us into dark and terrifying unknown territory. The song repeats the cry “ven a mis brazos” (let me hold you) and claims that love for our fellow loved ones is the only thing that can protect us from this new dystopian world. Musically, however, it is quite possibly the happiest, poppiest song on the album and it reminds us of ABBA at their most Eurovision-esque.
“Me Voy A Desenamorar De Ti” (a collaboration with the great Argentine diva Juliana Gattas, the lead singer from MIRANDA!, the most important pop duo in Latin America) and “Como el Mar” are similar both in music and lyrics. Both are heartbreaking songs that tell the story of toxic and impossible love surrounded by melodramatic, Almodovar-esque music that comes together to create a beautiful contrast with the intense electronic sound.
“Nunca Digo No” is a cry of rage against people who take advantage of the weakness of others who are afraid of saying no. The song’s reflection is that even with consent, we can’t be sure that a relationship (whether it’s sexual, professional, or any other kind) is really consensual. There are so many factors to think about, like fear or shame that could make us accept things that we don’t really want. The song is equally as aggressive lyrically as it is musically, and it is one of the noisiest in PAPA TOPO’s repertoire. The melody is melancholic, like a Spanish folk song, and it contrasts ferociously with the intense instrumentation, halfway between shoegaze and gabber, representing that mix of profound sadness and rage caused by feeling like you can’t say no out of fear of upsetting someone else.
“Dinero Rosa” is an ironic and fun portrait of gay capitalism or “gaypitalism” as it was coined by Shangay Lily. In recent decades there has been a new and powerful industry with the LGTBIQ+ collective as the target public and PAPA TOPO are aware that, somehow, they are a part of it. This commercialization of the rainbow initials promotes the assimilation of the collective within capitalist logic and turns the fight for rights into something that can be bought and sold. Musically, this is a crazy atonal parody that differs from some of the current cliches of music made with the gay crowd in mind, like an impossible cross between Schönberg and CHARLI XCX.
“Crist de la Sang” takes the form of an old romance, with a melancholic folk melody inspired by Mallorquin songs and wrapped in production that mixed elements of folklore with other electronic elements. The lyrics, written in Adrià’s native Mallorquin, tells the story of someone who has had an accident that has left their face disfigured, and who feels a deep and secret pleasure at the reaction their injuries cause their loved ones. These desires of victimization and self-harm in search of affection are an exaggerated hyperbole, but that blatantly and grotesquely show the twisted thoughts loneliness can lead us to.
To close the album, “Emasculación, La Solución” is a powerful, sharp and hilarious conclusion that takes on the topic that cuts through the whole album: hegemonic masculinity as the origin of all the world’s evil. To the beat of a fast-paced, rave-like Spanish pasodoble, and full of the irony of Álvaro Retana’s cuplés, the song cries out against manhood and encourages all its victims to fight against it. The lyrics explain that, historically, men have defended the impenetrability of their anus as a symbol of pure virility, which turns reclaiming anal penetration into, in some way, reclaiming the symbolic elimination of the masculine – emasculation.
The album was recorded, mixed and mastered by Lorenzo Matellán. The cover art, paintings that bring together the whole crazy and diverse universe that has been a part of PAPA TOPO since the very beginning, is the work of Rafael Rojas.
Welcome to this new adventure! We hope you enjoy the show.
