Polish Girl, the voice of Spanish indie-rock: “When someone who is 25 years old takes up pills to survive, something is going very wrong” | Culture | EUROtoday

The world doesn’t exist for the members of a bunch who spend the afternoon enjoying of their rehearsal house. There aren’t any home windows and to get to the road you need to stroll down a fifty-meter hallway and go down two flights of stairs. The door, made from thick steel, closes hermetically with a 50-centimeter lever. Crack! There isn’t any escape. The protection fails, time for the cellular phone to relaxation. The 5 of them are positioned in a circle on this musical bunker, in a small house filled with cables, pedal boards, and microphone stands. Technology, steel and sweat. The sound is insufferable, a lot in order that an ENT physician would instantly shut the place. We placed on our helmets, lest or not it’s…

Claudia (27 years previous), the keyboard participant, prefers to take her footwear off; Beto (33), the bassist, has ready a liquor-coffee; Kobbe (31) fights with some cables to activate his battery; Rubén (30) extracts elegant sounds from his guitar; and Álvaro Surma (30 years previous), the vocalist, sings with a lot ardour that it appears as if he had 10,000 followers beneath him. After two songs we cautiously take away our headphones, to stay deaf, however on the identical time to have the ability to expertise how the sound takes over the physique. Something has gone particularly nicely for them and Surma smiles at Beto; Minutes later issues bought difficult and so they argued: “It’s not my microphone that’s attached, dammit; let’s see if it’s going to be yours!” They assault the subsequent piece. It’s a Thursday at 5:00 p.m. and Niña Polaca is rehearsing the songs from her new album, the third of her profession, Where is the UN while you want it most? which was printed final Friday and which provides one other handful of generational anthems for these twenty- and thirty-somethings anguished by the zero prospect of accessing a house, with the field of anxiolytics on the bedside desk, with an irreparable mistrust in political establishments and with the identical sentimental swings between {couples} which were beautiful humanity because it occupied the earth.

Niña Polaca, a band shaped in Madrid however with half of the members coming from Alicante, reaches the class of main Spanish indie-rock band in a scene that features Carolina Durante, Alcalá Norte, Ginebras, La Paloma, Shego and Ultraligera. As music (and life), for higher or worse, are numbers, the Polish Girl says that in 2024 they stuffed Madrid’s La Riviera venue for 5 days, with 10,000 tickets offered. For this cause, their inevitable subsequent step seems on the calendar on January 15, 2027, the place they may attempt to carry collectively 17,000 individuals on the Movistar Arena, additionally a venue within the capital.

Álvaro Surma (Alicante, 30 years previous), vocalist, guitarist and lyricist of Niña Polaca, arrives on the assembly with EL PAÍS with an iced espresso in hand that he’ll quickly change with a beer, after which others because the afternoon progresses. Just per week in the past Surma left his job as a lawyer at a multinational. He stated goodbye to a “good salary” and an exercise that he’s enthusiastic about. In truth, he may have been dwelling as a Polish Girl for 3 or 4 years, like his bandmates, however he saved the swimsuit and tie job as a result of he enjoys it. “I left with sadness, to be honest, because I really like law, especially the legal technology part, where I am a specialist. But the group reaches a level where it is impossible to manage both things. In addition, I have set up an agency with the band’s guitarist. managers. “Too much work,” he says.

Álvaro has been in Madrid for 13 years. He came to the capital from Alicante to study Law and stayed. His father, Mariusz Surma, is Polish. A supporter of Solidarity, the Lech Walesa union that challenged the communist regime, he had to flee his country, like other militants, when in the eighties they were persecuted by the Polish communist regime. He landed in Alicante, met a Spanish woman and they married in 1992. A rock fan, he passed his passion on to his son: Álvaro saw Elton John when he was three, then the Rolling Stones (four times), Bruce Springsteen (three times), AC/DC, Judas Priest… His parents separated and Álvaro was estranged from his father for two or three years. Already reconciled, the Polish Girl leader invited his father to see the Rolling Stones at the Metropolitano in 2022, in the last visit of the Jagger and Richards band. It was a way to thank him for passing on his passion for music.

Polish Girl was formed in 2018. In 2026, already consolidated and with their third hot album, the group defines itself as “a burning bus driven by drunk monkeys.” The other four members, already reunited with their leader, clarify: “We are colleagues enjoying, having time, and studying to do issues. Now the monkey will not be so drunk.” [risas]so we keep our accounts, we take the most viable initiatives… We are five friends who make music without thinking much about where it is going to take us.”

The songs of Niña Polaca are nothing other than Álvaro’s life. “Fortunately or unfortunately it is my diary, yes,” he assumes. “At first, after we began, I used to be shy about exposing a lot intimacy. But then you definitely see that individuals make it their very own and I ended worrying. I do not cover. It’s my life, with out tips or cardboard.” Thus, we know that his therapist is called Luz and we are aware of the breakups and reconciliations with Carmen, his partner. The protagonist laughs. “Yes, we’ve got gone via many phases. Now we’re excellent, by the best way.”

Carmen is also a lawyer and acts as muse in several lyrics of the new album, Where is the UN when you need it most? but then the protagonist’s concerns lead to existential and social disenchantment. Sentimental stability drives Álvaro to look around him and he does not like the outlook, like many young people his age. “I’m on the left, however I’m very disillusioned with the left on this nation. Access to housing for a teenager is a chimera. The conventional events haven’t recognized protect the welfare system that we had, and when the primary buzzer in flip comes promising heaven, there are younger individuals who consider it and vote for them. It is partly the duty of the institution, that doesn’t give solutions to individuals’s issues. Let’s see the place this ends. I’m fairly scared, to be sincere,” he explains. He admits influences from the protest songs of the sixties and seventies, from Dylan and Springsteen, and also from artists who express themselves in Catalan (he understands and speaks it), such as Serrat, Lluís Llach, La Ludwig Band, Manel, Ferran Palau, Oques Grasses… “The present Catalan music scene appears to me to be essentially the most fascinating factor that’s being performed in Spain,” he points out.

in the song The greed and capital of foreign forces denounces “that the essence of our land has been sold.” “Since I’ve been dwelling in Madrid, I’ve been kicked out of three neighborhoods. The cities are depersonalized, they’re theme parks. And let’s not speak about Alicante, the place the whole middle is vacationer flats. We have offered the heritage of our cities for 4 {dollars}. In Alicante there isn’t any trade, solely tourism. Do we actually don’t have anything extra to supply the world?” In the letter of CSI Alicante (My generation) The resignation of Carlos Mazón is called for and he intones: “The pills for depression in which they have buried my generation.” “I have many friends who have been on medication for a long time and it makes me very sad and angry,” he says. “When a 25-year-old particular person has to fill their asses with tablets to have the ability to survive a day-to-day life that was imagined to be comfy, it’s a signal that many issues don’t work. I used to be prescribed anxiolytics as soon as as a result of I used to be going via a interval of nice nervousness. I had the tablets in my backpack, however I didn’t take them. That the tablets have been the reply to my nervousness made me very indignant and I didn’t wish to take treatment.”

Polish Girl continues rehearsing for a tour that will not cease all 12 months. The door to their rehearsal house is closed whereas they’re heard singing one among their hymns: “And it is not asking for too much or sinning from ambition. / Not wanting my world in a room. / Talking about the future and not hearing fear in every voice of my generation.”