Currently burning through their North American tour, Mexican Slum Rats, or MSR, are making a name for themselves. They are a five-piece band from Granada Hills, California, and they rock like nothing else. In every song, they hope to elicit overwhelming emotion, and their latest album, “See You Around,” fully encompasses that and more.
The album opens with static and heavily distorted guitars. “Lovespell Pt1” sets the tone for the next 30 minutes delving into the gritty, unnameable corners of the human experience. “Translations” bursts in, mostly instrumental, ending with a short verse, torn straight from the beating chest of singer-songwriter Kevin Villalba. Then, typically played back-to-back in live settings, “Hivemind” jumps at you, catapulting you to the jittery heart of a mosh pit. For longtime fans of anything adjacent to Screamo, “Hivemind” is sure to stir something deeply familiar within you.
The fourth track, “Over the Hedge,” offers a moment of reprieve. It’s sweet and delivers love in that typical emo drawl – like the way teenagers love their band T-shirts, until they fade. In an interview with Gas Tracks, the band reflected on their influences for “See You Around,” citing jazz and punk (saxophonist Matt Shulman) as well as emo, progressive (Raco Mendoza), and experimental rock bands like At the Drive-In, My Chemical Romance (singer-songwriter and guitarist Kevin Villalba), and Fall of Troy (guitarist Benjamin Schlesinger). As you listen to the album these genres and band names make complete sense. The band is rich with admiration for emotionally charged, intricately chaotic music paired with a relentless dedication to their craft.
The middle of the album feels like love, frustration, and sweat, leading into “Dead Grass Boogie.” This track opens with Matt Shulman crooning on the saxophone, but in typical MSR fashion, they drive the song into a rowdy verse. After this wind down, MSR gives us “Lovespell Pt2”, which feels like a gut punch, haunting and melancholic, as if wrestling with the toils and turmoils of love itself.
The last track on the album “Custer,” is another page from the well-worn emo playbook of the 2010s, soft and familiar, brimming with sincerity. If there’s one thing about MSR, it’s that beneath the bright, heavy electric guitars, raw yet guarded lyricism, enthusiastic drumming, and their beloved but occasional brass section, vulnerability stars in every work they put out. This vulnerability hasn’t gone unnoticed. Bassist Sebastian Felix notes fans coming from all over the country to see them, expressing his love for the community through music, a sentiment that resonates throughout every song on “See You Around.”
Singing from the heart of Southern California, MSR are only growing more confident in their sound, finding new ways to incite emotion in their fans. Truly, the biggest sign of a band’s success is their willingness to explore and challenge the impossible. As lead singer Kevin Villalba said, it only seems like Mexican Slum Rats will continue to “push the envelope.”