Rata Negra – “¿Qué Tendrá?” Video
Rata Negra are a Madrid three-piece who make a spartan, propulsive, extremely catchy version of DIY post-punk. They play with speed and precision, and they jam a fuckton of hooks into their music, singing in Spanish and drawing on the entire history of punk rock. You can hear the Raincoats in what they do, but you can hear Agent Orange, too. They’re great.
Thus far, Rata Negra have released two albums, 2017’s Oído Absoluto and 2018’s Justicia Cósmica. Both rule. It would be awesome if Rata Negra could keep up that one-album-per-year pace forever, but that’s probably too much to ask. Still, even if they don’t put out a new full-length this year, they are getting ready to drop a new two-song EP called La Hija Del Sepulturero. (Translation: Gravedigger’s Daughter. Badass title.)
Rata Negra just shared one of those two songs, and it’s a banger. “¿Qué Tendrá?” — Spanish for “What Will It Have?” — is a simple, hooky, effective new wave jam. It’s not as fast as a lot of Rata Negra’s older songs, but it’s definitely not slow. If you like Flasher, there is a very good chance that you will like this, too. Lyrically, the track adapts an old poem from José María Gabriel y Galán, a Spanish writer who died in 1905. Rata Negra directed the song’s gothed-out, mostly black-and-white video themselves, and it shows them ceremonially disposing of a body. Check it out below.
The La Hija Del Sepulturero EP is out 11/1 on La Vida Es Un Mos Discos, and it looks like it’ll also feature a cover of “Problemas No,” a 1983 sythpop song from a difficult-to-Google duo called Diseño. You can pre-order the EP at Bandcamp.